


Those Whom Fortune Favours

by JShale



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, The Engineer lives, fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 112,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9397016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JShale/pseuds/JShale
Summary: Actions beget reactions. The smallest change could result in the most radically different outcomes. In this instance, Dr Shaw finds herself putting the axe down and allowing her...guests...to introduce each other. A small what-if with a critically different outcome, this story explores an alternate path where two survivors are forced to forge a truce.





	1. Event Horizon

“ _If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.”_  
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass  
  


* * *

  
_He’s coming for you._  
  
It took longer than perhaps it should have for the icy stab of realisation to ricochet through Shaw’s shaking, adrenaline-addled body. From her hiding place amongst the clutter of Weyland’s belongings strewn about the deck, she found her fingers idly stroking the handle of the axe she’d found as she quickly weighed her options; backed into a corner, the adrenaline demanded she fight. The searing pain in her lower abdomen disagreed, resisting the painkillers she’d administered moments earlier with a series of rapid spasms that threatened to choke an agonised cry from her throat.  
  
She’d seen the monstrous creature that was now stalking her incapacitate her crewmates in less than a minute, whilst under fire. It had glanced off the rifle blast with nary a flinch and continued on its rampage, carving up the entire away team as if they were ragdolls. There was no way she could take it on with any expectation of _winning;_ she felt a fool for even entertaining the idea, however brief it was. These last moments would be seared into her nightmares for years to come, once this was all over.  
  
_If_ she survived at all.  
  
Another spasm ripped through her wounded body, the howl of pain that immediately followed lodging itself in her throat again. If the medicine didn’t do its job soon, she would end up giving her hiding spot away. The slightest noise could…  
  
_David._  
  
Sucking in a ragged breath, her finger hesitated over the comm panel. The android was clearly still functioning, and probably had little idea she’d chosen the coward’s way out; if he interrupted her, it would all be over in a heartbeat. She could always reactivate the system later, once she’d figured out how to avoid being horrifically killed by either of the two monsters now baying for her blood.  
  
Shaking, her finger finally depressed the button that muted the comm.  
  
The die was cast. Coward it was.  
  
The sound of strong hands prying at the airlock froze her blood once more. _Bang, bang. Scrape._  
  
Pressing her eyes closed, she willed her breathing to slow and hunched further, hoping against hope she would become so small, so compact, she disappeared completely from this godforsaken room. It didn’t take long for the creature to gain access, door hydraulics whining under the strain of being pried apart and forced backward into their alcoves; she heard its armour catching against the door locks as it squeezed itself through the gap, its deep gasps for air echoing about the damaged walls amid deafening silence.  
  
Slow, heavy footsteps paced about the room as the creature’s breathing soon slowed. She didn’t dare open her eyes as it appeared to pause, falling eerily silent for what felt an indeterminable stretch of time, the faintest of breaths the only marker of its presence behind her at all. It took another pace as she sucked in her lower lip, biting down on it hard as another spasm of pain threatened to force bile into her throat. Admittedly, this spasm was far less severe than the last few – a sure sign the painkillers were finally working.  
  
Out of nowhere, the crystals hanging from the ceiling gently brushed against one another; gentle, musical, their tinkling could not have been caused by anything other than a deliberate touch. The Engineer was still here, still behind her, and apparently taking great glee in taunting her. Apparently in no rush, it fiddled a little longer with the chandelier before taking another few paces, pausing again, and softly exhaling. With a brief, gentle rustle, the sound of the pages of a book being leafed through resounded against the bulkhead she was crammed against – what on Earth was it doing?  
  
Peeking one eye open and gingerly glancing upward, she could see only the gentle sway of a handful of the crystals above. How much time had passed? Minutes, hours? Each second of the creature’s presence had felt like an eternity, hammering at her sanity, leaving her wondering just how much longer she could stay cramped in this position with each that groaned by.  
  
With the softest of sighs the Engineer stood and scanned the room again. Both eyes now open, she could see the very top of its head over the apex of the bar’s countertop, presumably facing away from her given his hands were not around her throat, and she was not airborne. Yet.  
  
_Thunk._  
  
Swallowing despite herself, Shaw had no doubt in her mind what _that_ was. She’d almost forgotten about the screeching, tentacled nightmare locked in the infirmary in her haste to hide from the _other_ alien intent on smearing her across the carpet; her mind briefly ground to a halt as the scope of her predicament dawned on her, realising that unless the two were introduced, she would have to deal with _both_ of them at some point.  
  
Part of her briefly mused the value of sparing herself the agony and simply handing the axe to the Engineer. If her demise on this moon was inevitable, surely a humane exit would be preferable.  
  
_Slap. Screech._  
  
The medbay doors shuddered beneath the trilobite’s renewed assault, its screams raking at her eardrums and sending shockwaves of metallic horror through her teeth. A thick gasp permeated the air as the shaking trailed off, followed by near-silent, tentative footsteps away from her and toward the source of the unholy sounds.  
  
_Bang, screech._  
  
Shaw was barely aware of the fact that she had been holding her breath. She snagged another as the medbay doors shuddered again, this time eliciting a distinctly humanoid shriek of horror from the other side of the room and a flurry of panicked squeak of footsteps against the polished floor; the sudden activity immediately preceded the deafening cacophony of groaning, twisting metal and a sudden increase in volume from the hellish screams from the formerly caged monster. The doors whined again, steel on fractured steel as the bent, twisted husks retracted as far as they would go into their housing in their current state, followed by a thick, heavy _thud_ that shook the lifeboat against its precarious foundations _._  
  
So, her two _friends_ had finally met.  
  
Self-preservation finally fought to the surface, and she found herself peering past her hiding spot as the two creatures engaged in a clamour of equally horrific sounds in an attempt to ascertain whether she should leave them to it and run, or take a more proactive approach. Above the din she saw an inferno of long, sickly-coloured tentacles exploding from the twisted hole the creature had torn between the doors. The Engineer had seemingly tried to run, but not fast enough; fingers scrabbling desperately at the floor, it fought for traction as a tentacle dragged it by the ankle. She grasped for the axe handle as she watched, jaw agape, as the enormous humanoid slid across the deck back toward the screaming abyss of thrashing limbs.  
  
Its frantic kicking with a free leg did nothing to halt its progress, nor did its violent thrashing and punching slow the grasp of more tentacles at anything they could reach. It let out another recognisably _human_ howl as the slick appendages grabbed at both arms and legs, and eventually its neck, drawing it ever closer to the event horizon with its heart-stopping shrieks and screams.  
  
She turned away, unable to take any glee in watching either creature suffer. Pressing her eyes closed again, she fought the after-images burned into her vision as the bedlam behind her continued. Somehow she was alive to witness this, and every fibre of her being wished she wasn’t. Nothing, _nothing_ , could have prepared her for an inch of this.  
  
The Engineer’s shouts had raised in pitch and become breathless in its panic as it thrashed against the cthulhesque monstrosity. She flinched despite herself as one of the shouts became more of a wet, strangled gurgle, her knee reflexively knocking against the countertop and dragging against a long napkin hanging from it; it slipped free, sending with it an almighty _crash_ as the bottle of Vodka came to ground and breaking into several large, sharp pieces, followed by the distinct clatter of several knives bouncing across the floor.  
  
Her finger trailed up to the top of her suit’s zipper, lingering briefly where her cross should have hung. Her eyes couldn’t stray from the knives that had fallen alongside the axe, fingers probing as her mind raced. In any other circumstance, in _any_ other circumstance, she would not cower in the corner and watch the inevitable death of a creature. Given she’d all but discarded the opportunity of fleeing, citing a lack of viable places to flee _to_ , and given she’d almost completely ruled out an intact escape, she allowed a tiny voice to finally probe her psyche as it kept pressing for attention; _don’t die a coward. Do something!_  
  
She couldn’t decide whether it was the adrenaline still setting her limbs on fire, the painkillers finally dulling the burn, or the Vodka fanning the flames, but before she could stop herself she had forced herself to her feet. Bracing herself with the axe handle in one hand, she finally saw the full extent of the carnage over the bar; the monstrous trilobite had ripped a gap between the doors, but had bent them outward in the process and jammed them in place. The space wasn’t quite enough for it to break free, but by God it was trying. It had a tentacle around each of the Engineer’s limbs and one around its neck, and judging by the dents on the exterior of the doors, it had been slammed against them at least a couple of times. By this point the humanoid was bracing itself with both feet against the twisted metal several feet off the ground, left arm caught up in a mass of rope-like, slimy muscle while the right fumbled desperately with the loop around its neck. Its black, haunting eyes bulged and its pale tongue pointed and thrashed uselessly in its futile gasps for air. The noise, _God,_ the _noise_ …  
  
An agonised gargle escaped the Engineer’s throat, and the sheer humanity of the sound sent a pang down Shaw’s spine. Her grip on the axe tightened as she slowly padded closer, jaw still slack as every sense remained fixed upon the battle before her. The Engineer’s left arm seemed pinched, the fingers clenched in pain; before she could consider it too long, a mighty _crack_ resounded through the lifeboat, as if a tree had split in half right beside her.  
  
The scream that came from the Engineer despite being half-strangled told her all she needed to know. She knew _exactly_ what had befallen it...and precisely what she needed to do.  
  
Hefting the axe behind her and swinging it high above her head, she let out a scream of her own as she brought it down immediately above the pale, twisted hand. The door shuddered as the blade bounced off the alloy surface; from within, a high-pitched shriek all but deafened her as she swung again, ignoring the roaring pain in her abdomen, and forcing the blade through a second tentacle as the first fell away, a writhing mess upon the stained floor. The rope around the Engineer’s throat fell to the deck with a sickening _slap_ , followed by a series of panicked, ragged gasps from its victim.  
  
With a violent spasm and renewed screeches, the creature slammed itself against the interior of the doors and sent more tentacles through the gap toward the Engineer’s head. She swung a third time, primally aware of the stitches tugging at her ruined flesh but refusing to give the pain agency over her, embedding the axe blade in the tentacle that had again wrapped itself around the Engineer’s neck. With the ringing in her head and her vision refusing to stay entirely focused, she wasn’t quite sure whether it was a tentacle or a face she’d knocked the handle against as she wrenched her weapon free.  
  
From the corner of her eye she noticed the creature within had begun to change, seemingly opening up and presenting the most repulsive of mouths – if it could be called that. Another scream from the Engineer, this one of complete terror, had her whip around to catch a glimpse of its face; it was desperately trying to scramble away, energised anew in its efforts, black eyes fixated in utter terror on the gaping more before them both.  
  
She raised the axe again, idly wondering if she had the strength and accuracy left in her to deal a solid shot between the doors and into the behemoth’s most frightening features. It left her little time for consideration, suddenly shooting forth a long, pale appendage that seemed on an intercept course with the Engineer’s face.  
  
One last time, she swung her axe.  
  
A torrent of vile fluid spewed from the wound as the creature jerked backward, losing its grip on its victim as it fell from the doors and sprayed an arc of foul-smelling filth through the gap on the way down. The Engineer fell astride the doors, pulled to one side by the seething mass of flailing tentacles before being peppered with splatters of the greenish muck. After a moment, the fluid began to hiss where it fell on the floor and across the Engineer’s biosuit; soon it began to do the same thing to the blade of her axe, bubbling and fizzing as whatever the substance was began to consume the metal. Compulsion won and she jerked away, thrusting the damaged weapon against the pile of limbs before her as her insides spasmed with the sudden movement.  
  
The trilobite’s howls had quickly dulled as its meaningless flailing lost strength; on the other side of the door, ragged gasps permeated the air as the Engineer continued to thrash against the slackening tentacles, legs and right arm desperately pushing the slimy masses away and writhing across the floor. Its left arm remained hitched in front of its broad chest throughout the ordeal, even as it staggered to its feet and quickly crashed back down again, knocking its left elbow against the deck and eliciting another agonised shout.  
  
Pain returned with a vengeance as the heaving mass in the medbay shuddered to a gelatinous stupor. One hand reached down to tenderly grip her wound, instantly regretting doing so as several of the staples shifted in the process. She fell to her knees with a howl, both fists balled as she barely tolerated another series of spasms that felt like they would finally tear her apart. Distantly, she felt a string of snot and drool hanging from her lip as she gritted her teeth and sobbed through the searing pain; somehow she had not anticipated getting to this point alive, and now found herself without a plan for fixing the problem she’d just caused with that last burst of physicality.  
  
Thankfully the medicine was still doing what it said on the label; with a few heavy gasps and a determined grunt, the agony had ebbed to something somewhat more tolerable and, as her vision refocused, she forced herself to kneel and check the status of either alien that could still, by all rights, cause her an agonising death yet.  
  
Tentacles lay flaccid across the slick, stained floor, still and grey, as the creature behind the door continued to ooze. Across the hallway, huddled half-foetal against the wall, the Engineer cradled its injured left arm with the right, eyes squeezed shut as it apparently fought for control over its ragged breath. Shaw paused to wipe the mess on her face onto the shoulder of her suit before leveraging the wall beside her as she lurched to her feet.  
  
Pale face contorted almost beyond recognition in pain, the Engineer’s eyes shot open only when Shaw was almost on top of it. Its features appeared to yield to a myriad of emotions despite the creases of torment twisted across them, before pressing its eyes shut again and suppressing a strained grunt.  
  
It occurred to her that she was now in a conundrum; without medical attention, she would surely die soon. Her presence was also now readily apparent to the far larger humanoid, who could still deliver her a death blow and spare her the ordeal of dying from her injuries. With the medbay ruined, the alien ship crashed, the Prometheus annihilated and without another soul alive to treat her, she found herself with few options, little to lose, and no frame of reference for an ounce of this madness.  
  
Despite her better judgement, she made her way back to the bar. It had occurred to her as she reflected upon her last few minutes that she could at least go out having done some good; shuffling toward the mess strewn across its surface, she briefly picked through the clutter before grabbing a small, sharp knife, its long, pointed sharpening steel, and what she assumed to be a tablecloth. She stole a glance in the Engineer’s direction – it hadn’t moved, still grimacing and gripping its left arm. Good.  
  
Wrapping the items in the tablecloth, she forced her way back over to the prone monster before throwing her wares at its feet and sinking to her knees beside it all. The Engineer’s eyes flew open, locking an accusatory glare upon her own that left her momentarily transfixed, lost in the abyssal black that was its gaze; refusing to yield to it, she simply raised a bloodstained hand and pointed toward the huge arm cradled against the alien’s chest.  
  
It stiffened, sucking in a breath; she held her hands in front of her, cupping them in front of her chest and bent an invisible object back and forth as if testing its tensile strength. Something akin to confusion washed over what was left of its pale visage beyond the blackened burn engulfing nearly half its face, glancing between Shaw’s hands and her eyes.  
  
Pausing for a moment, she reconsidered. After further thought she raised her right arm, holding the forearm parallel to the floor, then tapped the centre of it with the index finger of her left before repeating her mimed gesture from earlier.  
  
Understanding gradually replaced the Engineer’s confusion. It simply offered a single, solemn nod, before letting its gaze drop to the floor with a heavy, ragged sigh.  
  
Just as she thought; the screeching menace had broken one of the bones in its victim’s arm.  
  
Slowly, cautiously, she reached down toward the sheet she’d acquired. Whether her languid pace was to show she was no threat, or to avoid injuring herself any further, was moot. The Engineer watched with obvious trepidation as she dragged the sheet toward her, revealed the small knife, and immediately embedded in the fabric. The enormous humanoid looked as though it was about to take a swipe at her with its good arm just as she began tearing a long strip from the cloth, but hesitated as she refused to react to the threat and simply continued ripping. A second strip, and a third, and she cast the remainder aside.  
  
She motioned with one hand in a _come, hither_ gesture, raising one of the strips of fabric with the other; the Engineer doubled down, responding with a deepening scowl and nothing more. With a sigh she raised her left arm again, loosely and demonstratively wrapping the torn cloth around her forearm before shaking it off and making a gentle grabbing motion in the direction of the alien’s left hand.  
  
It seemed to scrutinise her hand for an unsettling period of time, only gingerly half-offering it with the support of the other hand, but not close enough for Shaw to reach without leaning far closer – which, of course, in her current state, she was unwilling to do.  
  
What she did notice, however, was how _swollen_ the limb was. It was significantly thicker than the right forearm, stretching whatever material the biosuit was made out of and most likely contributing to the pain significantly. The left cuff of the biosuit had pulled free of the creature’s skin under the strain.  
  
She cautiously mimed the size of the limb with a gentle grabby-hands motion alongside the hand; the Engineer nodded again, lips pursed thin. She gestured again, cradling the fingers of both hands in a ‘hook’ shape, and dragged them toward her; when met with another confused and accusatory glare, she repeated the motion before pinching at her own forearm, tugging the fabric of her suit toward her wrist.  
  
This time, it understood; it extended one icy index finger, pointing at the knife just beyond its reach. After a moment’s hesitation she reached down and offered it, the darker part of her mind wondering if this was where she would die from being stabbed with something usually used to cut limes. Instead, the Engineer slipped the tip of the blade into the cuff of the suit and tugged upward, starting a small incision in the thick material. Visibly wincing, it grasped the handle with a closed fist and pulled harder, angling the blade so it slipped between flesh and suit. The little knife struggled with the dense material, stopping several times and requiring more force as it encountered nodes within the sleeve. Swollen, purple flesh protruded from the incision. It was a mess.  
  
It must have been a relief, because the Engineer’s twisted expression had become one more of concern as it examined the injury. Casting the knife aside, it watched with distant intrigue as Shaw picked up the sharpening steel, briefly trying to twist the plastic handle free before resorting to grasping the tip and swinging the handle into the floor.  
  
The Engineer flinched as the brittle black plastic shattered into several pieces, then watched pensively as Shaw removed what remained to expose a long, slim, blunt rod of hollow metal. She cautiously shuffled closer, holding the steel alongside the broken arm but at several centimetres’ distance. The creature made no effort to stop her, perhaps realising she was trying to _help_ – or, at least, that’s what she hoped.  
  
Unable to hold her arms at extension for very long with her innards torn to shreds, she shuffled closer again so that she could do what she had to do without causing herself any further injury. The enormity of the Engineer was all the more apparent when she was damn near pressed up against it, its knees level with her chest as she knelt beside the swollen limb. Finally she pressed the steel against the battered forearm as gently as she could, silently thanking her lucky stars as the creature made itself useful and tentatively grasped the end closest to its elbow.  
  
Slowly, gently, she began to wind a strip of fabric around the thick, bruised wrist in front of her. The Engineer’s breath hitched in its throat as it watched her work, still offering no resistance. She did her damnedest to avoid touching it as much as possible, instead leveraging the steel to get the bandage tight enough to work; it took every ounce of her focus to remain trained on the task at hand, not simply because of the ebb and flow of painful spasms through her core, but because at this point she’d noticed how the creature smelled. Above the foetid stench of the dead monstrosity in the medbay opposite them, and the vile-smelling fluids it had spewed against almost every surface, there was a heady air of masculinity that she found impossible to put her finger on, and equally as impossible to ignore. Whilst not particularly strong, it was pronounced enough that it permeated every other smell in the lifeboat, no matter how overpowering. She reasoned that _it_ was probably quite unfair; all things considered, the creature was most likely _male_ – if that meant anything in whatever world the Engineer came from.  
  
She was certain for one horrifying moment that she was about to get punched in the head as it came time to wind the bandage around the actual fracture. The Engineer had let out a monstrous scream, damn-near deafening her as he immediately raised a clenched fist; teeth gritted, he eventually opted to instead press the fist against his mouth, eyes squeezed shut and breath held as he offered the limb back to her. Heart pounding, hands shaking, Shaw simply continued what she was doing.  
  
It had never taken so long to splint a broken arm, she mused dryly as she tied off the last of the bandage around his elbow. There were a multitude of reasons, not least of which was the sheer size of the limb. The Engineer reluctantly raised his bandaged arm once Shaw leaned back, wincing again as he manoeuvred it back over his chest, briefly cradling it with his right before offering Shaw an inscrutable gaze. Battered, exhausted, this was a very different creature to the one that had pulverised her crewmates not long ago.  
  
The _other_ creature had gone long enough without observation; a violent shudder and grotesque _slop_ had both humanoids snapping their attention to the medbay in time to see the betentacled horror give one final spasm as something bulbous slid down through the severed tentacle-like protrusion hanging from its ghastly mouth.  
  
What emerged from the monster was arguably even more horrifying; a blotched, goop-smeared sac of _God-knows-what_ slid onto the floor twitching and pulsing as something inside thrashed about. Shaw heard the near-silent shuffle of the Engineer forcing himself to his feet. She shifted aside as he slunk past her, stepping gingerly between the flaccid tentacles across the floor as he reached down for what remained of the axe with his right hand, then unceremoniously brought it down upon the writhing mess between the doors; with a wet _squelch_ , the _thing’s_ movement was no more.  
  
The Engineer turned back toward Elizabeth after a moment, cradling his left arm close to his chest as he stepped back through the mess of tentacles; the confusion and disgust written across his face mirrored her own abject horror. It occurred to her that _now_ was probably her time, the injury strapped and the beast slain, but before she could consider the ways in which he might kill her, his deep, split-tone voice permeated the silence.  
  
Whatever he’d said was of course utterly lost on her, though his intent gesticulating with a pointed finger toward the heap in the medbay cleared at least some of it up. As her gaze flitted between the two enormous aliens, he repeated some of what he’d previously said slowly, deliberately, while making a broader, more sweeping motion with an extended arm.  
  
Another spasm of pain ripped through her gut as she shifted; the hand that she pressed against the wound and then retracted came back blood-stained, sticky and fresh. At a glance, it seemed her suit was now soaked along the incision. _Alright then, two birds with one stone._  
  
Drawing a breath, she pinched the suit zipper and yanked it down; gritting her teeth to dull the howl of agony that would surely have otherwise ruptured eardrums, she squeezed her eyes shut and drew ragged breaths and willed the pain to subside enough that she no longer felt the need to hurl her guts onto the floor.  
  
For the briefest of moments, a tinge of awkwardness fell across the Engineer’s face; it didn’t remain long, as the raw wound quickly caught his attention. Through her hazy, swaying vision, she saw the mighty creature turn away and momentarily bend over, just as her ringing ears caught the faint lurch of a dry-retch from across the hall. Blinking away the coloured blobs that had threatened to overtake her vision, she raised one feeble, quaking hand and pointed toward the splattered mess behind the bent doors, the other squeamishly tugging apart her suit to reveal more of the wound.  
  
The expression she met was one of contorted, mortified disbelief as the Engineer’s eyes bulged, jaw going slack, morbid realisation knocking the wind from his chest. For a moment, he appeared as faint as she felt. But the cold air against her reopened wound had awakened a sense of urgency in her that hadn’t been present until she’d torn her suit open; she needed to reassemble herself, and with the surgery pod in a state of ruin, she knew she was staring down the barrel of doing it manually.  
  
And there was a grey, stinking hulk stopping her from doing just that.  
  
Once the Engineer’s horrified gaze returned to her, she quickly mimed a stitching motion from one side of the wound to the other, face pinched as she raised a finger and pointed toward the medbay.  
  
_Fair’s fair, big guy. I helped you, now you help me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is somewhat of an unapologetic fix-it story that demanded to be written, because I've already started writing the sequel. Based on a rather odd lucid dream I had involving these characters and many more, this story explores an alternate chain of events that doesn't repeatedly descend into meaningless violence, and where there are obviously TWO survivors of the ill-fated Prometheus voyage. 
> 
> Part one of three planned stories for these two (though the middle one involves a hell of a lot of others, too).


	2. Phantasm

The Engineer had stared at her for an indeterminate length of time, the expression on his face a muddled mess of shock, confusion and disgust. His gaze had eventually fell to the mess on the floor before trailing into the medbay, slowly fading to an almost saddened understanding.  
  
Reaching down, he carefully grasped at the axe handle again with his good hand. The blade had by now fizzled and melted beyond recognition, so what he intended to do with it was somewhat of a mystery; Shaw simply stood back, taking deep, ragged breaths as the pain from her wound refused to leave her, and watched as the Engineer reached through the gap in the door with the axe handle, gingerly poking the grey behemoth spread across the floor. He paused, dark eyes all but welded in place as he silently observed the stinking mass, before giving it one last, somewhat harder jab.  
  
The creature was well and truly dead.  
  
Heaving a sigh of apparent relief, he took a tentative step backward and set about sizing up the doors. A dented, scraped and twisted mess of steel, neither looked to be going anywhere soon; their bowed profile left them fouling against their alcoves almost half way along, leaving deep creases in the outside of both. The creature had been far too large to get out through the gap whilst alive and thrashing, it sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere in its present state.  
  
 _Blam._  
  
The echo of the hollow steel frame’s assault echoed about the lifeboat; in the next moment, the Engineer sucked a breath through clenched teeth and wrung his right wrist, apparently regretting attempting panelbeating with the palm of the one good hand he had left. It’s not like the doors could simply be re-fashioned on a whim, though. They were designed to contain almost anything – anything except, apparently, a monster-sized trilobite.  
  
A half-inch of gap had appeared between the jamb and the left door.  
  
Having already taken note as he poked at the gap with a finger, the Engineer glanced the door up and down once more. After taking another step away and turning away from the injured woman, he raised one leg and landed a mighty, deafening kick against the bent left panel. The lifeboat gently swayed against the rocks below with the impact, the floor briefly vibrating beneath her feet.  
  
A cold shiver ran down Shaw’s spine as the assault belaboured the obvious; this creature was _strong_. There was no way could have taken him on and survived. A simple kick had reshaped the ruined door, albeit with an enormous boot-mark embossed into it, and as he quickly demonstrated with a hearty _shove_ , enough room for the left at least to retract another foot into its alcove. Still holding his damaged left arm across his stomach, the Engineer paused another moment to warily stare at the grey mass within, glancing about its girth before giving it another gentle nudge with the toe of one boot. For his efforts, it simply slopped limply.  
  
For a moment, he looked like he was about to be sick. Or, at least that’s what she interpreted his rather upset expression to be. Perhaps she was projecting her own rising nausea onto the alien.  
  
Grabbing the axe handle once more, he nudged at the left door with the back of his shoulder before placing the battered edge along his spine and pressing against the opposite side with one foot. The opening wasn’t particularly wide, and it left him cramped in somewhat of a horizontal crouch, unable to exert his full force upon it. His eyes never left the monster below him as he raised his other leg, balancing precariously between the two doors before gritting his teeth, grunting, and pushing with all his exhausted might.  
  
A cacophony of screeching, twisting metal clawed at her eardrums and left her teeth tingling. A sound like that could wake the dead, though she sincerely hoped it _wouldn’t_ , given the sort of dead that was sprawled across the place beneath them both. As the ringing in her ears subsided from a near-scream, she realised what the worst of the metallic racket had been; a layer of material had been shaved off the surface of each door, now lying as glinting swarf by each doorjamb.  
  
The huge humanoid had wrestled almost a metre of extra space between the doors with that stunt, leaving him no option but to jump from his position between them, barely avoiding landing on the mass of tentacles still lying between them. He’d clearly noticed as much, and scrambled aside with a shudder the moment his feet hit the ground.  
  
“ _God,_ you’re strong,” she all but whispered, alternate scenarios ploughing through her mind one after another as to the different ways he could have used that strength. How she was still alive she did not know, though the day was still not over just yet. The Engineer’s dark eyes snapped to hers the moment she spoke, wide with incomprehension, seemingly pondering her briefly before turning back to the mess before them.  
  
With a vaguely defeated sigh he reached down for the remains of the tablecloth, pinching it against his side with his elbow before twirling the length of it around his hand, resorting to using his left hand only to tuck the end into one of the loops in the jury-rigged mitt; even that was enough to elicit an agonised groan from him. At this point she had no idea what he was up to, but she thought it best to silently observe as she idly gripped her torn wound rather than ask too many questions.  
  
An age seemed to pass as he stared grimly at the tangle of limp muscle at his feet, lips pursed and downturned into an unimpressed grimace; eventually he glanced back at her, waving her away with his mitted hand, then gave one of the longer, thicker tentacles one last nudge with the toe of his right boot. As she stepped backward, standing clear of the hulking carcass, she watched as he expelled another long, defeated sigh, pressed his eyes closed, then knelt down and grasped the appendage with his insulated hand.  
  
The _thing_ let out an unholy squelch as its immense body slid through the gap in the doors, tentacles slapping uselessly against the polished floor as they shifted beneath the bulk’s weight. Softly grunting with each laboured breath, the Engineer made quick work of dragging the dead horror clear of the medbay and half-way across the main room. He paused to steal a couple of heavy, ragged breaths,dropping the tentacle to wave a couple of times in the direction of the medbay.  
  
Shaw wasted little time in shuffling toward the wrecked infirmary, trying her best to avoid the trail of ooze smeared across her path as her eyes darted about the mess. The surgery unit was unlikely to be useful in its smashed, filth-smeared state; the console had burped up a litany of warnings in red, none of which appeared remarkably helpful, and the shield over the top of it had only one panel left intact. Cupboards around it had been knocked open, their contents scattered about the room in various states of disrepair. Much of it was slathered in mystery goo, no doubt courtesy of her _offspring_. Its own offspring – or rather, the pulpy mess left after the Engineer had smashed it to smithereens – remained by the doors, apparently dragged a small distance beneath the larger creature before coming to rest as it lay.  
  
 _Where to even start,_ she mused. _I need to clean the wounds, get more painkillers into me, begin stitching up the multiple layers of me that are currently half hanging out of me…_  
  
Grabbing a small tray from a benchtop that hadn’t been turned upside down, she started with the most obvious; something to clean the wound. A quick rustle yielded several options, all of which she plopped onto the tray before moving onto the next – painkillers. Several packs had been thrown to the ground, but the rest were apparently on the top shelf of the cupboard the others had fallen from. Good, she wouldn’t need to bend down to retrieve them.  
  
Other equipment swiftly followed with a little hunting, though she was left wondering just _how_ she was going to do this. She was not _that_ kind of doctor, though the thought was enough to elicit a soft, humourless breath of laughter from her. Of all the times to have a degree in anything but medicine.  
  
A distant _slop_ caught her ear; turning toward the main airlock, she noted the Engineer had managed to drag the corpse across the lifeboat without disturbing the majority of the books strewn throughout the main room, and was now fumbling with the airlock controls, apparently making haphazard guesses as to which button, or combination of buttons, released the doors. _He’s a clever cookie,_ she thought to herself as she turned back to the tray of implements and medicines, _he’ll figure it out._  
  
The beeping of barely-educated guesses continued as she found a bottle of hand sanitiser that hadn’t been smashed against a wall, filling her hands with a generous couple of pumps and slathering it over what skin wasn’t covered by her suit. _This damn suit._ She let out a frustrated groan, quickly realising she couldn’t even access the worst of the incision with the blasted, skin-tight thing still on. Fingers still sticky, she set about gently prying the shoulders, then sleeves, of the suit from her body without putting undue strain on her abdomen; she could afford to leave half of it on, she reasoned, so long as she could fumble with the incision unimpeded.  
  
The familiar hiss of an airlock being activated echoed through the main room as the Engineer apparently forced it to give up its secrets. A _delightful_ series of slick, sloppy, heavy sounds followed as the creature was manhandled out the door and into the open, falling with a fleshy _bletch_ to the ground on the moon’s surface as the airlock hissed shut again behind it. Perfect timing to ditch the rest of the suit, she reasoned; with a final, queasy push, she managed to wriggle free of the top half.  
  
Perhaps it was her mind taunting her, but she could have sworn she heard someone gagging and retching in the distance. When she’d finished the grisly task ahead of her, she promised herself she’d get it over and done with, and vomit her guts out.  
  
Taking the tray of goods with her, Shaw made her way to the couch that was still on its feet; it wasn’t ideal, but at least she would be able to prop herself up in such a way that she could repair the damage. It would have to do.  
  
The world spun as she sat down, then eased herself backward; if she survived this, she had no idea what state she’d be in after a few hours, let alone what to do about it – but she would cross that bridge as it came.  
  
In the foggy vestiges of her mind, she wondering if it was possible to overdose on the wretched things, she hastily injected herself with another dose of more targeted painkillers near the surgery site. Relief came quickly, and she steeled herself for whatever mess awaited her below; with a sigh of relief, she realised it was not as bad as she’d thought. Several staples had been torn loose and the reopened section was somewhat ragged, but it appeared at a glance that everything inside – shudder – was relatively intact.  
  
Sanitising her hands again, followed by the incision site with something an obnoxious yellow hue and the tools she had collected, she set about carefully reassembling herself the best she could. With the adrenaline flooding her veins once more, it proved relatively easy to push aside thoughts of exactly what she was doing and simply focus on getting it done. It occurred to her that if she made it out of all this alive, there was at this point almost nothing that could shock or scare her. Surely the universe had run out of terrifying and grotesque things to throw her way.  
  
Before long she had pulled all of the loose staples free, leaving only those that appeared to be holding, and replaced them with a row of somewhat awkward but hopefully effective stitches. They would undoubtedly leave scars, but she would happily take scars over any of the alternatives; it’s not like the most damaged of organs was of any use, of course. She supposed, bitterly, that it was better her than a woman that could have made use of any of it.  
  
It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried in vain, of course; she swallowed the lump in her throat as the previous few days came rushing back to her, invading her psyche from every angle, threatening to choke her as the eyes of the dead tore at her skin. She’d been so busy surviving that she hadn’t had time to stop and think about any of this.  
  
 _There’s still surviving to do_ , she scolded herself, scowling through the tears that had formed as she loaded a cartridge of antibiotics into the dispenser. _At least get yourself in one piece, then you can start feeling sorry for yourself._  
  
A double dose wouldn’t hurt, would it? At this point, she was probably primed for all manner of infection if she didn’t. Applying a dose to either side of her repaired incision, she considered for a moment just how far she would be able to move in a few hour as she started healing; reasoning it wouldn’t be far, she collected the cartridges for both the painkillers and antibiotics and placed them on the floor beside their diffusers within arm’s reach, applied one last thick layer of antiseptic over the stitches, and dropped that alongside the rest before pushing the tray to the end of the couch with a booted heel, and slumping against the couch cushions with a ragged, tear-soaked sigh.  
  
It was over at this point, surely. Stitched back into one piece and with both aliens outside, she was finally alone and out of immediate danger. _And, how_! She was the only living Human on this godforsaken, toxic hunk of rock; her crew, dare she call them _friends_ , were all dead. She’d witnessed several of them meet their untimely ends, and knew just how absolute everyone else’s had been. There was no escaping being torn to pieces, mutated into something truly abominable, blown to smithereens aboard a vessel on a suicide mission, being flattened or being thrown across a room room with spine-crushing force. Or _being burnt to death_ …  
  
 _Charlie._  
  
 _That_ thought was enough to send her over the edge. Nothing could possibly have made his death right; not the cause, and certainly not the ultimate end. If there was to be an innocent victim of this entire operation, it was without a doubt Charlie.  
  
The noises that escaped her were inhuman, choked and desperate. Part of her mind felt as if she were standing beside the sobbing, screaming, seizing mess of a woman, observing from elsewhere as an entire galaxy imploded upon one sorry being, swallowing her whole as she fell into the event horizon; the rest of her couldn’t breathe. There was not enough oxygen in the place. She screamed as the eyes of the dead watched her, impassive and cold. She screamed until she choked and gagged, screamed until her throat burned.  
  
She screamed until she could scream no longer, shaking and spent, face contorted into something unrecognisable, eyes swollen shut, mere whimpers escaping her raw throat. Finally, inflamed and spent, her overtaxed mind collapsed, at last allowing her the refuge of sleep.  
  
 

* * *

  
  


There was nothing like being presented with a litany of one’s every mistake, every poor choice, every unfavourable flip of the coin in the inertia of sleep. The moment she had drifted off, she had been standing amongst her every regret from the moment she could walk.  
  
She hadn’t been alone in the process; standing in her shadow as she marched from one disaster to the next was a growing crowd of scowling faces, each mistake stepping in behind the others as she grew from a little girl, to an awkward, nerdy teenager, to a dazed adult still fumbling with the world around her. After a while, she realised that she’d been blindly waltzing from error to error, marching headlong into each and every one despite the fact that she could easily recall what was going to happen next and knew exactly how to avoid the apparently inevitable outcome as yet another scorned individual joined the burgeoning crowd. Fate seemed to tug her inexorably toward it no matter her efforts.  
  
The ice of the ever-watching stares drew a shiver down her spine; it was _freezing_ in here. She clutched at her arms with both hands as she forged on in the darkness, almost breaking into a run as she tried to leave every one of them behind. Why were they judging her every damn move! Surely she wasn’t such an awful person that she deserved this wall of bemused onlookers!  
  
No matter where she ran, they followed her. Before long, she had started to leap chasms – foreign countries called, their ancient secrets promising solitude from the watchful eyes and a chance at redemption. But it didn’t take long for a fresh group to begin forming in her shadow as others began to force their way back in. Each subsequent hop brought a brief reprieve, but in time, they had started to find her again.  
  
The desire to tear her own face from her skull and thrust it at them was overwhelmingly strong; they could take her, judge her, and she would start anew.  
  
She considered it long and hard, too. Everyone deserved a second chance. Surely she should be allowed to prove herself.  
  
And yet, they still watched.  
  
In the darkness, it was almost impossible to see anything except the faces that stood before her. The faster she’d run, the quicker they’d followed; the moment she stopped, they simply hung nearby. Running was little use, evidently.  
  
Her breath caught in her throat; for the briefest of moments, she could have sworn that every single face with their laser-beam focus upon her was _her own._  
  
She blinked, and a hundred familiar faces returned; Janek, Weyland, three of her assistants, her archaeology professor, the doctor that had diagnosed her infertility, her next-door neighbour when she had just turned twenty-one, her high school maths teacher. Her father. Charlie.  
  
 _No._  
  
Someone had stepped immediately beside her. She could feel someone’s breath against her neck, slow and deliberate, but she couldn’t see who it was in the dark. She froze in place, eyes wide as the hundred faces dissolved into mist, and she was left with just one faceless being standing right next to her in pitch black.  
  
Panic rose within her as she felt warm, clammy fingers being pressed into her neck, probing her jugular. The cold had since vanished, replaced with a stuffy heat that threatened to choke her, tickling at her skin, as the being remained mere inches from her.  
  
In the next breath the back of the hand was pressed against her cheek.  
  
With a scream she flinched away, jerking free of the unwanted touch with her eyes pressed shut.  
  
When she opened them again, she was damn near blinded by searing white light. Searing white except for…  
  
The ghostly, statuesque visage of an enormous white creature stared back down at her, glistening black eyes unreadable by her overtaxed vision.  
  
Naturally, she did the only thing her sleep-addled brain could do: she screamed, flinching away with force.  
  
The being jerked away in the opposite direction, recoiling with a wince as the short, sharp shriek escaped her. A mighty spasm of pain erupted through her body immediately after she’d shifted, and with it, reality arrived upon her like a tonne of bricks. The lifeboat – she was on the lifeboat and full of stitches. The Engineer had returned, and she was _absolutely sweating._  
  
Heaving a mighty groan, she allowed her head to roll back against the arm of the couch as she pressed her eyes closed. _God_ , she was _exhausted._ The Engineer muttered something unintelligible under his breath with a resigned sigh.  
  
The sound of rustling caught her attention; small, solid objects clanked against each other as they were pushed about. Carefully pushing herself into more of a sitting position, she glanced across the room to find the Engineer kneeling on the floor, rifling through what she guessed to be a somewhat solidly-constructed bag of sorts with his right hand as the bandaged left hung about his waist. He briefly paused, casting her a cautious glance, before resuming his search.  
  
It was at this point she noticed why she felt so unbearably warm despite the air in the lifeboat being noticeably cool; there were two, if not three blankets draped across her. The cotton-covered duvet against her skin was likely more than enough, but there was also apparently a woollen throw and a sheet on top. Being in no state to have found them herself and having no memory of doing such a thing, she realised it must have been the Engineer that had dumped them over her. It made sense, as she’d fallen asleep with half her body exposed save the bandage wrapped around her chest, and had most likely gone into shock as the medicines wore off. She would have been absolutely shaking as she slept.  
  
The Engineer eventually found what he was looking for, pulling a small, gunmetal-hued hexagonal box from the bag. There were a series of intricate lexicons embossed along its surface, none of which she recognised despite what she’d previously thought to be an extensive enough understanding from her years of digs. Grasping it in the palm of his hand, he shuffled back over to her with what she could only describe as an oddly deliberate grace.  
  
She was getting tired of musing all the different ways she could meet as grisly end as every one of her crewmates every time the alien came near her, inventing new and often violent ways the immense creature could take her life – and the _ease_ in which he would dispatch her. Her pulse raced as she ever-increasing options filled her head, flitting wildly between escape scenarios and the sort of beleaguered defeat that damn near invited it.  
  
Instead of acting upon any of the scenarios she had dreamed up, the Engineer murmured something softly, almost carefully, seemingly enunciating each word as clearly as he could muster. Speaking so quietly and passively, she noticed that his voice sounded vastly more human than she recalled; though deep, it almost completely lacked that second, rather alien tone about it at this volume. He punctuated whatever he’d said by raising the jar in his right hand toward her and extending an index finger toward the incision in her belly beneath the blankets.  
  
Immediately squeamish, her eyes widened as her face contorted in something akin to a somewhat panicked disgust. She didn’t want the creature to have anything to do with her wound!  
  
His black eyes observed hers for a drawn-out moment, unamused and pensive, before quiet inspiration spread across his burnt features. Turning to rest his weight against his left leg, he raised his right knee into a crouch and balanced the jar against it then placed his uninjured right palm over the lid, pushed down, and twisted. It popped free with a metallic _poonk_ , after which he gently set it down on the ground in front of him and lifted the lid free.  
  
Still within Shaw’s range of vision, she observed its contents; the box’s walls were thicker than she’d expected, forming a circular well in the middle that was full to the brim of a shiny, viscous fluid that bubbled iridescent white in the seconds after it had been exposed to the atmosphere in the lifeboat. That wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting, though in truth, she hadn’t the foggiest what she expected these days. Had it been days? Hours? Time had become entirely relative at this point.  
  
The Engineer punctuated the silence with another couple of words she couldn’t understand, catching her glance briefly; he must have known explaining anything at this point was no use, because rather than repeating himself or waving his good arm about, he instead raised the injured one toward her. Still swollen, it clearly caused him pain – he’d bitten his bottom lip as he held the broken arm away from his body, a deep scowl creasing his heavy brow. The index finger of his right hand unceremoniously dipped into the silvery-white goop, and he wasted little time in demonstratively smearing the thick substance over the litany of scratches, cuts, abrasions, bruises and burns on the back of his fingers. Once coated, he leaned closer to her so the damaged fingers were front and centre in her field of view.  
  
She watched with wide eyes as the substance quickly dried over the cuts and abrasions, though it took noticeably longer to do the same over the burns – whether the blotchy marks had been sustained during the crash or in wrestling the festering behemoth outside was anyone’s guess. Its sheen had quickly evaporated and slowly taken on the appearance of dry, flaky skin; still holding his hand less than a metre from her and at an angle that must have hurt, he picked at the edge of one of the patches of dried _stuff_ with a fingernail and peeled it free once there was enough to grip.  
  
The skin beneath was completely healed.  
  
Gobsmacked realisation seized her; this must be Engineer medicine. But of course – the whole _point_ of these people was their bioengineering prowess! That’s why she came here! Grappling with the thick blankets that had left a film of sweat on her from head to toe, she shoved them downward and pushed them below her wound. The cold air hit her exposed skin like a bucket of water, and immediately she was shivering, but her eyes never left the newly undamaged skin of the icy-white hand before her.  
  
“Do it. I don’t give a shit what that stuff is, do it.”


	3. Elixir

The intellectual, academic elation toward what was about to happen, even though she would be observing it from the first-person, damn near blinded her to the way the Engineer’s face fell from one of apparent approval to pensive concern. His hairless brow furrowed after an extended pause, and he murmured something she of course couldn’t understand as he pointed at her wound again; when she offered no intelligible response, he gingerly poked at one of the strands hanging free of the rest of its stitch, retracting his hand as she flinched reflexively and gaped at him in horror.  
  
Her head spun just thinking about it, every sound in the room dissolving into static. She had _just_ stitched the bastard back together, there was no way she was going to pry her insides back apart _again_! The very thought brought back the violent nausea she thought she’d conquered. In fact, she barely caught the enormous, convulsive gag in time, and found herself forcibly swallowing what had very nearly become projectile vomit.  
  
Clearly getting the message, the Engineer forced himself to his feet as he expelled a slow, deliberate breath. He stood before her, one index finger curled against his lips as if deep in thought. She could hardly meet his gaze as the room spiralled above her, shaky hands raking at the rat’s nest her hair had long since become. What a choice to be left to make: carve herself up, or face a long and fraught recovery that would likely leave her permanently damaged.  
  
Pursing his lips in thought, the Engineer cast a glance toward the bag he’d brought back with him; she all but ignored him as he resumed rummaging about, drawing deep, ragged breaths to bring her body’s response to the suggestion back under control.  
  
Willing calm upon herself, her eyes drifted to the windows behind the couches, no longer displaying their saccharine snowy forest simulation, but the pitch-black landscape of the alien moon. She couldn’t see much through them – in fact, she could see nothing at all of the landscape beyond the feeble illumination cast by the interior lights of the lifeboat; the black of night was all that greeted her, starless and heavy with cloud cover. A breeze had since kicked up, howling about the exterior of the vessel and whistling about its curves. Who knew how much time had passed at this point – had she been out for just the remainder of the day, or had it been days?  
  
How many days, weeks, months, would she be sprawled on a couch on an inhospitable planet teeming with death, with only an unpredictable alien giant as company?  
  
Swallowing the aftertaste of her near-miss with emptying her guts, she drew one last ragged breath before gently, painfully propping herself up with her elbows; agonising indefinitely wasn’t going to make this decision happen any faster, but she most certainly wasn’t in favour of simply ripping herself open again if this wasn’t absolutely guaranteed to work. Reaching down with one hand, she brushed the surface of the white substance the Engineer had brought on board with an index finger. Less sticky than she was expecting, it seemed vaguely gel-like and cool to the touch; she brought the finger to her face, more closely observing the mystery goo as it slowly lost its form. The iridescence, she realised, was courtesy of the tiniest of particles suspended in it – the goo itself appeared almost transparent, just laden with fine, powdery material.  
  
She easily found an obvious scratch on her other hand. In fact, she found many – she was in quite a state. Choosing a fairly small but raw, puffy and irritated example on the back of her hand, she set about carefully, cautiously smearing the goo across its length.  
  
Almost instantly she felt a chill against the wound as the particles within the substance began moving; she gasped as the sensation quickly inverted and became one of significant warmth, tugging softly at the skin around it as the goo seemed to evaporate and lose its sheen. Wide-eyed and almost forgetting to breathe in her awed fascination, she tentatively poked at the white smudge left behind; an edge in the thin membrane appeared as she rubbed at it, and peeled off with ease as she pinched it between two nails and tugged.  
  
Perfect, unmarred flesh greeted her as she removed the last of the substance.  
  
The Engineer had since stopped rustling about, having pulled a few more items from the bag but little else for all the noise he’d made; he had been watching her intently as she experimented, that much she’d caught from the corner of her eye. She glanced back at his dark eyes, vaguely wondering just how painful his face was and how he’d managed to ignore the state of it as well as he had, before giving him a knowing, thin-lipped grimace of a smile. It would be ridiculous to waste this chance at cheating the deep gouge in her abdomen, as much as she couldn’t bare the thought of messing about with it any further.  
  
There was nothing for it. Reaching down again, she fumbled with the tray of surgical material by the base of the couch until she found the painkiller dispenser. Quickly checking whether there was anything left in it, she wasted little time in pressing it below the incision and injecting a dose, exhaling heavily as the cold wave of relief radiated through her body moments later.  
  
The Engineer had crouched down beside her again, watching with parted lips and furrowed brows as she tended to herself with pointed determination. She’d collected and sanitised everything she needed for the grim job ahead beside her hip on the couch, and cast her guest a final defeated glance before setting about undoing all of her hard work.  
  
Without a doubt she would be having nightmares about this for many years to come.  
  
Pushing every ounce of subjectivity from her mind, she probed the site with a small, sharp pair of snips. As long as she focused entirely on the task at hand, she should be able to get it done without panicking – in theory. All she needed to do was remove everything holding her in one piece, and then the white goo would do the rest.  
  
Not that it was a walk in the park, mind. Snipping the stitches open had been a revolting experience in and of itself, let alone having to tug them free and reopening the wound. The Engineer had let out something akin to a horrified gasp as the wound parted, briefly unable to watch as she moved on to what remained of the staples. She shot him a scowl as he’d turned away, distantly wishing she had the same privilege throughout this sordid ordeal.  
  
Disgust aside, she’d cleaned herself up as fast as she could with the intention of getting this over and done with well before the painkillers wore off again. Carefully dropping the surgical tools over the side of the couch once she was done, she looked up expectantly at the Engineer as he watched her with transfixed chagrin; he’d gawped on at the wound for a little while longer, eventually double-taking as he noticed her staring him down, then finally reached for the jar by his knee. Pausing once more as his hand hovered over her wound, he glanced back at her as if asking permission; resisting the urge to slap it from his hand and do it herself, she simply nodded emphatically and squeezed her eyes shut.  
  
Without further hesitation, he tipped the jar and let a thick string of the white substance pour from the vessel and deep into her wound. She flinched hard as the cool goo hit her flesh, registering only the apparent temperature of it and no more but reacting to the shock regardless. It pooled in the wound and spilled out the far edges, quickly becoming sticky and adhering to the outer edges of the incision, seemingly moving under its own power and reforming, pinching at whatever it came into contact with.  
  
Placing the jar down and covering it with the lid, the Engineer briefly glanced back up at her as she snuck one eye open – his expression, as burnt as it was, seemed almost apologetic. What on Earth for?  
  
In a breath, it felt as though he had poured liquid nitrogen into her wound. Her insides spasmed with enough force to jerk her back off the couch cushion, eliciting an uncontrollable cry of both surprise and pain as she flinched. One hand shot down toward the wound, desperately trying to grab at it, anything to quell the building cold that gripped at her spine, her ribs, everything…  
  
...but she found herself grabbing at an enormous hand instead.  
  
“Stop!” She hollered, groaning again as her insides shuddered under the assault of sensation. Through the ringing in her ears she was vaguely aware he had said something back in a low, patient voice, but she didn’t care; she wanted that stuff _out_!  
  
A second hand made a grab for her furious insides as the cold suddenly became searing heat, unbearable in its intensity and enough to turn her moans into shrieks of agony. Despite her desperate scrabbling, huge fingers had intertwined with hers and had firmly clamped down on both hands, effectively immobilising them, keeping them from grabbing at the wound and keeping the inferno very much alive.  
  
Another scream escaped her as her abdomen convulsed, knees jerking upward and hitting a solid object before she could press them to her chest. She could barely breathe for the next howl began, fingernails digging into the mighty hand that held both of hers in place, digging at the flesh she couldn’t see for the tears that had flooded her vision. It hurt, God it _hurt_ , hurt like nothing she could have imagined, and it just kept on going and going and _going_.  
  
An aeon seemed to pass as the burn yielded to a distinct _tug_ , an unknown force grasping at her with a thousand tiny hands and dragging the edges of her incision toward each other. Her knees fell slack as the tugging intensified, howls having devolved into exhausted, defeated sobbing, her grip on the Engineer’s hand akin to clinging to a life raft. Twisting, pulling, her insides _ached_.  
  
And, as suddenly as it had started, the sensations simply tapered off to nothing; feeling nothing but a dull, gentle, almost soothing chill in the assaulted area, Shaw finally released her grip on the massive hand that held her and collapsed back into the couch a sweat-soaked, tear-streaked mess. Taking a moment to slow her ragged breathing, she grabbed at her hair and closed her eyes, letting the last of the tears run down her face. Still faintly convulsing, her body was clearly as confused and exhausted as her mind was; she was hot and cold all at once, gradually aware that she was completely sweat-soaked and had begun to shiver.  
  
A soft, deep sigh caught her attention; the Engineer cast her an unreadable glance as he stood, murmuring something before trailing off with an impatient huff. It seemed as though they would both struggle with the language barrier for a while yet. She followed his gaze down to her incision, eyes widening at the thick, two-inch wide layer of translucent goo that now covered her; rather than drying to a thin membrane, this time it had formed what almost looked like a pale second skin with a vague sheen to it. It certainly _hurt_ less, and it looked far less gory, but the alienness of it struck her in a way she hadn’t quite expected. She barely recognised it as her own flesh.  
  
Momentarily crouching by her, the Engineer plucked the half-empty jar from the floor and paced back toward the bag with it. Surely he should be using it on his own wounds? She cleared her throat. “Are you really done with that?”  
  
He cast her a quizzical glance over his shoulder. Rather than repeat herself, she motioned with an index finger at her face, then pointed at the jar.  
  
Squinting incredulously, he briefly looked her up and down, failing to see any injuries on the tiny creature that might need such repair. She shook her head, pointing at the Engineer’s head, then back at the jar in his hand. “Not _my_ , face. _Yours._ ”  
  
Still scowling, he raised his right hand to his face, touching his cheekbone with the index finger as he gripped the jar with his other fingers; Shaw immediately made an urgent pointing motion with her own hand, motioning toward his left side. Disbelieving, he humoured her regardless and poked at the other side of his face – and damn near dropped the jar as he hissed in pain, immediately spitting something that must have been an expletive. Wide-eyed, he stared back at Shaw for a brief moment before scowling and glancing about the room, turning on a heel toward the windows behind the couches and urgently marching toward them. A loud gasp escaped him as he finally saw the damage in the reflection, followed by the same sharp, angry-sounding word again strung amongst several others.  
  
Experimentally, he placed the jar in his left hand – and promptly handed it back, grunting and retracting the injured limb back to where it had hung for several hours. Pinching the jar between his right thumb and index finger, his scowl alternated between it and his maimed reflection in the window, before falling back on Shaw. After a moment’s consideration he headed back to where she lay on the couch, drew a defeated sigh, placed the jar in her hand, and knelt back down in front of her, mumbling something in his alien tongue. Suspecting she understood what he wanted, she mimed dipping her finger against the closed lid then pointed at his face; he offered a silent, shallow nod, then turned the burnt side of his face toward her, leaning down so he wasn’t looming over her to such an overbearing degree.  
  
The lid twisted free with a hollow _poonk_. Placing the jar down briefly, Shaw rested one hand against the couch cushions and twisted her hips around; it was a battle to perform the manoeuvre with the sort of gentle grace her wound demanded, regardless of how healed it may have become in the last few minutes. Once she was satisfied she was positioned so she didn’t tweak the incision as she worked, she lifted the lid and dipped her middle finger into the goop as the Engineer’s dark eyes watched.  
  
_Where to start?_ The burn was huge, deep, and without a doubt serious. Without simply throwing the contents of the jar at him in one messy go, this was going to take some time – and if her own experience was anything to judge by, he was going to be in agony. _Even if he’s likely used to the stuff by now._  
  
Biting her bottom lip, she set about smearing the stuff on his forehead where the burn began. Unmoving, he simply drew a breath as her finger, tiny against his features, traced its way across the edge of the injury. It would take _ages_ at this pace; dipping two fingers into the goo and scooping out a generous amount, she redoubled her efforts as she smeared it liberally from one side of the burn to the other. She had never considered she’d be so close to an Engineer, let alone tracing a finger over his alien – and yet so remarkably _human_ – visage. Secretly, she wished it had been under far better circumstances than this. There was something hauntingly magical, beautiful, about the creature’s porcelain, translucent skin, and it seemed such a waste it was so damaged.  
  
He let slip a retrained grunt as the goo began to morph around the edges, his scowl deepening beneath her fingers as they crossed over it and toward his cheekbone. She supposed it had entered the _icy-fucking-cold_ phase, freezing against the burnt skin; she noted, as she slathered her fingers again, that his hand was shaking as he gripped at the deck, and wondered if the sensation was just as horrible on one’s face as it was in one’s internal reproductive organs.  
  
The silence within the lifeboat hung like molasses, punctuated only by the breathing of the two wildly differently-proportioned humanoids within and the feverish _thu-thud_ of her own heartbeat; occasionally the craft would shudder against its foundations as a significant gust of wind rattled against it, but little of that sound made its way inside. It was at this point she found herself once again aware of the Engineer’s scent, given how close she was to him – as alien as it was distinctly _male_ , but hardly unpleasant. In fact, she hardly minded it. There was something old, almost musty about the air in the room, but she supposed the suit he wore was probably to blame. It had, after all, been in stasis as long as he had, and God knows what would happen to man and machine alike with such an unprecedented period in hypersleep. It was a miracle he was alive at all.  
  
Tilting his head as she got to the last of the injury along his jaw, she realised he was holding his breath. _He’s done this before_ , she mused, reaching for the side of his head as she dabbed the last of the jar’s contents across the burn. _That’s why he knew I was going to claw myself to death if he didn’t immediately intervene._ The goo she’d first smeared across him and turned thin and opaque around the edges, but had taken on the same sticky, glossy translucency as it had on here where the injury appeared more serious. Its transformation followed the path her fingers had taken, gradually thickening and tightening against the marred flesh, gripping at the edges and growing opaque where it had finished its work, and hardening where there was more serious work to do.  
  
She wiped her fingers against the bandage-bra she was still wearing after all these days, idly wondering if she would actually fit any of the clothes on board the lifeboat. The Engineer rolled backward and sank into a hunched sitting position as she clicked the empty jar closed, his good hand shaking as it groped blindly for the frame of the couch; the powerful digits creaked against the leather surface as he steadied himself, eyes squeezed shut in apparent agony as he drew deep, ragged breaths.  
  
Patiently waiting for the effect of the medicine to lose its grasp on the poor creature before she considered rolling onto her back again, Shaw instead passed the time marvelling at the intimate details of his face while he was in such close proximity. The heavy brow; the strong nose, its bridge merging in a smooth arc with his forehead; his large, dark eyes, squeezed shut and rippling at their edges as he endured the effects of the sticky substance; the curve of his high cheekbones, so reminiscent of her own; his chiseled, angular jaw, distorted and creased as he pursed his lips shut; there was a statuesque beauty about him that left her mind trailing back to the many exquisite works of art back on Earth, the veins beneath his translucent skin a haunting reflection of the intricate forks of colour through the marble that statues were so often carved from. _That_ was what fascinated her about him; it was as if he were a living, breathing effigy.  
  
In time his breathing slowed, finally trailing off with a heavy, laden sigh as he sat up from his hunched position and opened his eyes. As much as she’d just marveled at the _humanity_ of his features, the black abyss of his gaze, however low-lidded in his exhaustion and hints of defeat, never failed to startle her. Forcing a smile after her initial flinch, she stole the opportunity to cautiously roll back over and tug the duvet back over her, grasping at what little dignity she had left, and snuggling against it to quell the cold that groped at her skin. The Engineer silently scooped up the empty medicine jar and tossed it back at the bag as he stood, once again drawn to the bay windows as the warmth of the blankets gradually lulled Shaw back to the dead of dreamless, exhausted sleep.  
  


* * *

  
It wasn’t the constant staccato of rustling paper and the soft _thunk_ that followed that roused her from sleep, nor was it the periods of near-constant boot-steps pacing around the lifeboat from end to end. It wasn’t the howling wind outside or the vessel’s shudders beneath the mighty gusts, though she was vaguely aware of it as her consciousness wavered; no, it was that infernal, near-inaudible, high-pitched _scree_ of a device she didn’t recognise.  
  
Blinking in the harsh artificial light as her vision struggled to adjust, she reflexively clamped a hand to her mouth as an enormous yawn erupted from her lungs. With the windows still dark, she wondered how long she’d been out this time; mindlessly pushing herself to a seated position, her sleepy gaze picked at the room beyond the couches as she fumbled for context.  
  
Somewhat of a path had been cleared between the bar and the bookcase, with the strewn mass of books pushed aside and finding order closer to the shelves. A handful had been placed along the top shelf in seemingly random order, jammed in tightly enough that they were unlikely to fall again without a significant jolt. The scattered bar utensils had been piled back on top in a neat stack with the shattered glass of multiple bottles kicked into a tight mound to the far side of the area. Wiring conduits that had hung free of their intended locations in the crash had been tucked away, nowhere near where they were supposed to be but no longer dangling, waiting to catch against occupants as they strolled too close.  
  
The artificial _scree_ had stopped as she’d sat up. She froze; _why_ had she sat up? _How_? She immediately stared down at the incision, suddenly adrenaline-addled enough that she registered no pain. She was greeted by a thick layer of translucent white material that bent with her as she moved, vaguely reminding her of an excess of hot glue. There was a thought for the day: she had been glued back together, in a manner of speaking. She reasoned it may not have been merely adrenaline that had yielded a lack of pain.  
  
A soft sigh snapped her from her reverie; perched awkwardly on the couch opposite, the Engineer resumed doing whatever he’d been doing before she woke up, staring down at his left forearm as he held it in front of him. In his right he held a small, black device that emitted a beam of white light aimed at what she assumed to be the break in his arm as he pressed one of the buttons on its ornate surface with his thumb. _That was the noise,_ she realised as she observed him intently; _I really must find out what that thing is. Pity I can’t just ask him._  
  
However long she had been in and out of consciousness, it had most certainly been a fair amount of time since she’d eaten or relieved herself. Both functions had alerted her to their need, and she figured her guest wouldn’t mind being left alone for a while given the way they’d met; she rotated her hips and gingerly pushed herself to her feet with a grunt, tugging the top-most blanket free and wrapping it around her shoulders as she shuffled toward the vessel’s bedroom under the Engineer’s watchful gaze.  
  
The room was largely intact, it seemed, having survived the crash with only a few upended items crashing to ground and laying shattered across the floor. The bed was bare apart from its pillows, and she quickly realised where the blankets she’d been sleeping beneath had come from. Quietly sliding the door closed behind her, she set about picking around the room and getting her bearings; the bank of drawers on the far side of the room had been left undisturbed, their locking mechanisms keeping them from spewing their contents throughout the room. The top-most drawer clicked free as she gently tugged on the handle, gliding effortlessly in her hand; within, thank the heavens, was quite a collection of women’s undergarments – all predictably white and most likely expensive, but far cleaner and more comfortable than what she was presently wearing. Hopefully they would also be her size, or at least a close approximation of it.  
  
The next drawer down revealed more of Vickers’ clothes, grey and form-fitting, and without a doubt too long for her. It would have to do; she couldn’t run about the place in her underwear with a male aboard.  
  
_He’s an alien, idiot – he probably doesn’t care._  
  
Continuing her search, she turned to inspect the wardrobe – and was met by her bloodied, bedraggled, sweat and dirt-smeared reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror on the outside of the sliding door. A look of disgust overcame her; what a sorry state she was in! A shower was long overdue, she decided. Besides, at this point, the dried sweat caking her skin had begun to smell vaguely rancid. Enough was enough.  
  
Padding back to the drawers to pluck out the first undergarments that came to hand, she tossed the blanket aside and shuffled toward the bathroom; as needlessly vast and over-decorated as every other room aboard, she quietly noted the shower was particularly large, as if accommodating for several people – or a wheelchair. Probably both. It made sense; Weyland had intended to use the facility, presumably having achieved immortality but allowing for his time beforehand, and presumably having abandoned the Prometheus crew.  
  
The thought made her feel ill with indignation.  
  
Having parted company with what remained of her jumpsuit and the bloodied bandages wrapped around her, she quickly relieved herself before poking about with the shower controls. At the touch of a wall-mounted button, water streamed like rain from a large, circular opening in the ceiling, immediately warm to the touch; she stepped beneath it in a heartbeat, a ragged sigh of relief escaping her as soft droplets enveloped her from head to toe, rinsing away the trauma of the past few days with its comforting warmth.  
  
Unsure just how much water was on board, she made quick work of soaping herself up and shampooing her hair. It was clear by this point that while she was still wounded from her emergency caesarean, there was little pain from the incision. The white goo seemed to be holding form even when saturated and soaped, reacting no differently to undamaged skin, and allowing her so much freedom of movement it was as though she was almost completely healed. Remarkable technology, and something she vowed to find out more about in time.  
  
Refreshed beyond description, she eventually convinced herself it was time to get back to work and sort her _other_ problem; with another press of the controls the rain fizzled dry, a few stray drops falling from the outlet and draining away to what she had to assume was a recycling system elsewhere on the vessel. She soon found a thick, plush towel, and set about drying herself off and dabbing at her hair.  
  
_Curse Vickers and her stupid perfect body_ , she swore to herself as she wrestled with the bra she’d acquired earlier. While both women apparently had a similar cup size, Shaw’s broader, more muscular frame had no intention of accepting the garment without a fight. Even as she finally managed to clasp the outermost hook, the bands felt stretched and far too tight against her skin. The underwire faintly chewed at her ribcage. She would have to search for a larger size later, as much as it pained her to admit.  
  
The panties weren’t much better, she quickly discovered as they pinched at her hips and rode up her the moment she moved. Unless she shrank in the next few days, or Vickers had stashed a variety of sizes in the off-chance she needed them, survival was going to be awkward and uncomfortable for quite a while. She found herself tugging the underpants free of her backside before she’d even left the bathroom.  
  
Another peruse of the contents of the drawers revealed some slightly looser options. Baggy gym shorts and a thick, woollen turtleneck made for odd and somewhat unfashionable bedfellows, but she figured it was important to be at least somewhat comfortable as she recovered from both her injuries and the last few days of traumatic events. At least she was clean at this point, even if she was _famished_.  
  
_Food._ Her stomach churned in agreement; pulling the boots from her jumpsuit free and tugging them on, she released the bedroom door and meandered back out into the main living space, past the piano, and toward the bar.  
  
Her guest had since stripped the makeshift bandages from his arm and tidily dropped them on top of the pile of glass near the bar, and was warily inspecting the damage beneath his biosuit with a heavy scowl. Still smattered with deep purple bruises, it at least seemed far less swollen than it had when she first tended to it. Given he was moving it about freely, it was safe to assume whatever he had done before had repaired enough of the damage that he no longer needed the splint. He cast her the briefest of glances as she entered the room before deferring back to the task at hand, though moments later she caught his gaze against her bare legs as she leaned over the front of the bar. She shot him an expectant, deliberately patronising look before heading for the food dispenser as he hurriedly glanced back down at his arm.  
  
It was immediately obvious that Weyland’s dispenser was different to the ones provided aboard the rest of the Prometheus, though she had come to expect as much from a man who was so caught up in narcissistic self-obsession that he had prepared, ahead of time, to eject himself from the rest of the crew for a luxury cruise back to Earth as an immortal. The idea of dining of any of the extravagant, expensive tripe displayed in the first few pages of the menu threatened to dull her hunger, though at this point she would probably settle for eating the food dispenser itself. Eventually she found something plebeian enough that it doesn’t leave her wishing the bastard a second death at the hands of her guest, placing one of the few intact plates into the grate and standing back to watch it work its magic.  
  
Another upgrade from the Prometheus’ dispensers, she quickly noted, was the way in which it plated the meal. Rather than ejecting sustenance onto the plate with little decorum, Weyland’s unit made a point of tidily assembling to restaurant quality and topping with unnecessary garnish. _Carbonara doesn’t need garnish, you pretentious oaf,_ she sneered to herself, briefly considering how she might arrange a second blow to the head for the infirm billionaire.  
  
Still, food was food, and having found two forks amongst the chaos, she picked up the heavily laden plate and made her way over to the couches.  
  
The Engineer had by now set his device aside, watching the tiny Human intently as she placed the piping-hot meal down on the coffee table that had wandered across the room during the crash-landing. After a moment’s consideration she headed back to the bar, strolling back and forth along its length in thought, then finally reached up and grabbed several bottles and a couple of hi-ball glasses. Tucking the bottles under one arm, she strolled back over to the table and carefully righted her stash.  
  
By now, she had the Engineer’s full attention. Good thing she had ordered the dispenser to serve up double. One of the bottles she’d brought back was a brand of Gin she didn’t recognise, nor did she care to; she simply twisted the cap off, sloppily pouring the most generous of shots into one of the hi-balls, before topping it up with the tonic water she’d also dragged across from the bar. After a quick taste, followed by a thirsty drag, she pushed the bottles toward her guest one-by-one, followed by the other glass, and one of the forks. The other she swiftly dug into the steaming pasta, twirled, and shoved into her mouth with the dignity of a starving wolf.  
  
Understanding yet rightly wary, the Engineer reached for the first of the bottles she’d tinkered with, dark eyes locked on her as he raised it to his face, twisted the cap off, and carefully inhaled.  
  
It must have met his approval, because he’d set about pouring a significant volume into his glass as she struggled with the overzealous mouthful she’d forced upon herself. He repeated the process with the tonic water, hesitating a moment before topping the glass up to an inch from the lip. After another tentative sniff of the drink, he took a small, dubious sip.  
  
She watched with amused glee as he raised both brows, squinting and suppressing a cough as it slid down his throat. Just as she was sure he would discard it, he raised it back to his lips and took a huge gulp. This time he did choke into the back of his arm, which she noted was his left; she had to confess, it warmed her to see the creature was no longer in obvious pain.  
  
Poking the fork toward him with one hand, she set about loading her own up with another excessively generous wad of gooey, bacon-laden pasta; placing the glass down, the Engineer fumbled with the implement for a breath before awkwardly imitating her twirling motion with a singular strand of spaghetti. His enormous hand made the fork seem comically small, and unless he intended to pick the plate up and shovel it into his mouth, she realised it would probably take some time for him to eat his fill. Not that it would be a problem; it seemed they had all the time in the universe to kill at this point.  
  
The mere thought left her reflexively reaching for the glass, downing more than half of what remained before she could stop herself.  
  
Apparently the carbonara had passed the taste test too, because his second stab at the plate was not nearly so shy. She set about refilling her glass and quickly emptying it again as she watched him all but scoff mouthful after mouthful, only pausing to do the same as she returned to digging her fork in once more.  
  
The excessive serving had diminished to about half its size as the blissfully warm tingle she’d been patiently waiting for drifted to her extremities; a pleasant blush had crept across her cheeks by this point, and she was left pondering the wisdom of a third top-up despite her rampaging thirst. Maybe that was enough Gin for one night. God knows it would have to last a while yet.  
  
Having proven somewhat less coy in his consumption, her guest had easily downed twice what she had in the same period of time and had little to show for it apart from a noticeably more relaxed slouch as he hunched over the table, stuffing his face with no indication he intended to stop any time soon. It was probably a good thing, as the remainder would have gone to waste as her appetite finally waned and she found herself resting back against the couch with a satisfied sigh, cradling her belly in a pleased, tipsy stupor.  
  
He barely acknowledged her as she slumped backward, clearly sated; it wasn’t long before he had all but scraped the plate clean, expelling a huge sigh as he relinquished his fork and reached for the last of his drink. By this time, the faintest hints of colour had tinged the night sky, deep reds staining the heavy clouds enough for her to see their heaving, roiling forms in the morning light. Outside, the wind continued to howl with increasing ferocity, screaming around the bends of the lifeboat as debris and sand pummelled the metallic hull relentlessly. This storm, whilst less extreme than the first they had encountered, seemed more determined to stick around.  
  
Without the foggiest how long it would last, and thus how long they would be stuck inside the lifeboat at its whim, she decided one last drink couldn’t hurt. She shot her guest a wry grin as she helped herself to one last stiff drink. If she was going to be left alone with her thoughts, the least she could do was mute them from an endless scream to a dull roar.  
  
Whether it was copycat behaviour or similar resolve, the Engineer didn’t need much coaxing to swiftly follow suit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was really, really hard to resist the urge to have them both drink themselves into oblivion and lie on the floor together crying because, you know, Gin.


	4. The Archaeologist

The passage of time certainly hadn’t gotten any clearer as morning faded to afternoon, and Shaw’s tenuous grasp on it had been blown to oblivion as the liquor had soaked its way in, barely slinking back as the effects of her meal had gradually faded. Not that it mattered, but it had to be one of the more bizarre breakfasts she’d had – and her guest certainly took the title of the strangest companion present at a meal.

They had both simply sat in silence once their meal was finished and their glasses drained, Elizabeth staring at the ceiling lost in her own thoughts as the Engineer’s gaze remained locked on the landscape outside. Perhaps Gin wasn’t the best choice she could have made. It always left her feeling a little melancholy at the best of times, and given the utter catastrophe her adventure had been thus far, it was all she could do not to burst into tears again. The lump in her throat had well and truly made itself at home for at least a few hours, or until the red from the sky had long since faded to a dull, stormy blue-grey behind the blanket of debris still whistling about the lifeboat. Any attempt to dislodge it had been met by a barrage of self-pitying excuses, her brain unable to focus on much else.

Its effect had apparently been somewhat different on her guest. It had barely been light by the time he’d nodded off, still sitting on the couch, his head rolling back against the top of the cushions despite his tipsy slouch, such was his immense height. He’d stayed frozen in that position for quite some time, snoring softly, before momentarily jerking awake and instinctively lying down along the length of the couch, legs dangling awkwardly off the end and head propped against one arm, and immediately started snoring again. Given she had passed out twice since he’d been awoken from hypersleep, she figured it was about time he got some rest – God knows how much time had plodded by.

Reflecting on her own awakening only days ago, she realised just how much further Humanity had to go in this space-age game; having felt like utter death for quite some time after waking up and emptying the contents of her stomach rather violently in the aftermath, it only just occurred to her how differently things had played out when the Engineer had been raised from two millennia of hypersleep. He’d sat straight up the moment the waking cycle had been initiated, and whilst he’d briefly collapsed after standing, he had hardly been worse for wear. _He’d been quite energetic, in fact_ , she remarked glumly, watching the sleeping creature on the opposite couch with the same trepidation that refused to leave her the moment she placed him back in the context in which she’d met him.

It was difficult not to begrudge him, still; it had all seemed so irrational and outrageously unfair at the time, as any violent outburst tended to be in her mind. All they had were _questions_. It wasn’t as if they’d pointed guns at him and demanded his treasures.

Except they had, hadn’t they? Weyland hadn’t hesitated in making grandiose and entitled requests, and Jackson’s rifle had been aimed defensively at the enormous being from the moment he moved. It was unlikely he was planning for Human guests when he’d gone into hypersleep, and being woken up by them, unannounced, can’t have been a pleasant surprise. Until now, all she had remembered from their initial encounter was pain, awe, desperation and terror – all, selfishly, in relation to herself. She hadn’t for a moment considered how it must have been to have been dragged to consciousness by _aliens_ all shouting at once in a foreign language after years in hypersleep, unaware of anything that had happened in the interim. She somehow doubted she would have been so composed herself if she’d been revived aboard the Prometheus decades later, outnumbered by alien creatures in the midst of chaos; she’d undoubtedly be a shit-storm of screaming, vomit and mindless panic.

She pressed her eyes closed, trying to recall more of the encounter, trying to etch the details into her memory permanently before they faded into the endless abyss of their current predicament. She’d been so focused on counteracting Weyland’s narcissistic bluster that she had barely noticed the most significant discovery in Human history. How stupid! First Contact with an alien race, the first alien race Humanity had ever encountered, and they had spent it briefly bickering amongst themselves before being torn to shreds. It wasn’t like he’d stepped out swinging, either; he’d barely acknowledged them at first, simply staring in a half-lidded, baffled gaze as incomprehensible chaos and noise unfolded at his feet. She realised he hadn’t even _interacted_ with them until David started translating Weyland’s nonsense…

_No_ , he had looked on in horror as she’d been floored with a rifle to the belly. She had caught the briefest glimpse of his mortified expression before she kissed the deck.

Now that she thought about it from a few paces aside, his actions seemed less baffling; he’d watched his uninvited guests yelling and screaming at each other, proceeding to drop one of their own with sudden violence, then turned to make demands of immortality. They hadn’t even introduced themselves.

Something about what David had asked, or perhaps David himself, had clearly proven so offensive that it warranted beheading the Android. That she still didn’t quite understand, as he’d clearly known who was responsible; Weyland had been his immediate, second victim. As for the other two, she supposed _being shot in the chest_ was reason enough to see to the armed intruders with deadly force. Not that it had slowed him down at all; perhaps he hadn’t meant to kill but had underestimated his own strength against far smaller creatures, or perhaps he’d intentionally neutralised what was clearly a threat in the most efficient and permanent way possible.

Why he came after her with all that said and done raised more questions than she had the capacity for in her current state, let alone questioning why she was still alive – or how, or _why_ , he had gone back to his ship and _returned here_ , with _medical supplies_. Her running assumption about the violent, unpredictable nature of the Engineers – or at least the singular one they had encountered – certainly lost integrity when she considered the violent, unpredictable display they had put on for him, and came unstuck when she brought into question everything that had happened after her _offspring_ had been dispatched.

The snoring man on the couch was an enigma wrapped in mystery.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole ordeal was that the only other living creature left on this death-ridden rock had no common language, no common culture, and apparent hostility toward her entire species. There was little to be gained without some sort of understanding. An upper hand in this department would certainly be helpful.

Part of her mulled over the chances a _different_ Earth language would provide overlap. After all, these people had visited Earth many times in the past, hadn’t they? Some of the lexicons carved into the walls of the structures they’d _just finished defiling_ had seemed familiar, but nothing she could read. Could there be Mesopotamian connections, even enough to cover the very basics? Were there any useful goddamn books on this bucket?

There was only one way to find out.

As her guest snored on, dead to the world, Shaw set about bringing some form of order to the books still left on the ground. For a moment she faltered as to whether she should at least group them by some kind of genre or simply jam them together by author, but given the enormity of either task, she simply opted for the path of least resistance and scooped an armful from the floor.

The top shelf, far from her reach, had been munged together in haphazard earnest; there was no rhyme or reason amongst them, let alone order, but if the Engineer couldn’t read a word of English, it was as good as he could do. The rest fell into place in due course as she paused to inspect the occasional, somewhat interesting example, hoping each new book she picked up would be something relevant to the task at hand. Unfortunately, it seemed neither Weyland nor Vickers had any interest in history.

Some of the books that hadn’t been kicked aside were badly damaged, she soon found. Mutilated as if burned by chemicals, they smelled acrid and somewhat foetid; her stomach churned as the stench brought with it images of giant, flailing tentacles when she closed her eyes, bound to its source most likely now rotting outside. They would have to be disposed of, preferably with fire and brimstone and a splash of Holy Water, as soon as the opportunity arose. She nudged the desecrated books aside with a boot, instead focusing on the other, intact examples that needed filing.

_Someone had terrible taste in entertainment,_ she mused as she kicked aside another third-rate murder-mystery novel with a fire-themed cover and cliché title. She was tempted to add it to the pile of half-dissolved refuse in the corner, but begrudgingly tucked it alongside the others on the increasingly loaded shelf beside her as she reached for another armful.

The lifeboat gently swayed back and forth below her for a few seconds, its oscillation rocking the glasses and rattling the forks still on the coffee table by the windows; outside, the wind had reached fever pitch and had filled the air with increasingly large chunks of silica, dust and assorted debris as it uprooted what remained of the vast, barren landscape, pummelling the vessel with a ruthlessness she hadn’t often seen on Earth. It still lacked the incredible gusts of the first storm she’d encountered and nearly died in here, but there was _no damn way_ she was stepping outside in that.

Oblivious, the Engineer fidgeted on the couch in his sleep; with a nearly-inaudible mumble he rolled onto his back, one knee curled beneath the other on the cramped couch, and resumed his slumber. It wasn’t exactly warm in here, she realised, glancing down at the gooseflesh gripping her bare legs. If their metabolism was anything like that of a Human, it had probably dropped enough in his sleep for him to be feeling the cold as much as she was – that is, if his bizarre suit didn’t compensate for it.

Giving it less thought than she ought to have, Shaw padded back over to the couch she’d resided on for the last indeterminate period of time and quietly shook the duvet loose before carefully, gently draping it over the sleeping behemoth. If anything it was a gesture, she reasoned – a returned one, at that.

The pile of books had grown smaller, but she’d barely put a dent in it when she considered just how many were still sprawled across the deck. She would have to break for more food before it was even half-done, and she’d rather spend the time actually narrowing down language options from every inch of what she knew of the cultures with records of Engineer interaction. It wasn’t like she could just spit up the most useful parts from memory; while she could make the connections, draw links from the text, she _needed the damn text to refer to in the first place_ before she could start work. A dictionary would be ideal, but at this point she would settle for a magazine, a high school textbook, anything.

As luck would have it, at the bottom of the pile near the piano was a significant collection of _National Geographic_ and _Time_ magazines, some of which were likely of historical value for their significant age. Easing herself down, mindful of her healing wound, she pushed aside the trashy romance novels cluttering the pile and began sifting through the magazines, wide eyes scanning for the most vague of references she could possibly consider useful. Thanking whatever she had any faith left in for bestowing upon her the twin gifts of patience and vigilance, she soon began to build a stack of reference material beside her, pausing to flick through the most promising candidates and dropping them into a separate stack for closer inspection.

Given how difficult it was to tell the time, especially with the days seemingly shorter on this small moon and the storm outside diffusing the majority of the daylight, she was only somewhat sure it would by now be afternoon. Her stomach was inclined to agree however, eliciting a wavering gurgle as she began thinking about her next meal. This time, at least, she had far more interesting entertainment. Perhaps lunch would require a little more sobriety today.

She set about moving her half-metre stack of reference back to the coffee table, squatting for small handfuls in several journeys rather than trying to be a hero and risking fresh damage to her insides. As she rearranged the growing stack on the table, she noted the Engineer had shifted in his sleep, having rolled over again and wrapped himself into a compact burrito of blankets, only the top half of his head and one hand visible at one end, with his calves sprawled out the other. It was oddly endearing, and she couldn’t help but grin as she turned back to fetch more books.

Dropping the last of her reference material on the top of the pile had been enough to jolt the huge humanoid from his sleep; he sucked in a breath as he flinched awake, blinking in the artificial light before letting out a dazed groan and an enormous yawn into the palm of his hand. Opting to give him some room to regain consciousness with slightly more decorum than their first time they woke him up, she set about clearing dishes from the table and making some sense of the bar in preparation for lunch.

The Engineer eventually sat up, still tangled in the duvet, as she tidied the utensils off the floor and threw the majority of the cutlery and crockery about the place into the dishwasher. Yawning again into the crook of an elbow, he seemed to be drinking in his surroundings with considerable confusion; twisting about as the dishwasher drawer unceremoniously crashed shut, he regarded her with the most perplexed of sleepy squints, the corners of his mouth downturned and drawn. After another brief scan of the room, his eyes widened with realisation – it was as though he’d remembered the previous day, or days had not been some horrendous dream. His gaze found the floor soon after, his expression one of...sadness? Concern? She didn’t quite know what to make of it, apart from obvious unhappiness. _You and me both, buddy._

The least she could do was offer him some food, she reasoned. It wouldn’t fix their current situation, but they still needed to eat as they found a way out of this place.

Wait, when did she become _plural_?

Quickly dismissing the thought, she set about scrolling through the food dispenser’s ostentatious menu. Eating pasta two meals in a row sounded dreadful, but she had no idea what these people ate. He could have _hated_ their meal last night and simply eaten it out of politeness, or she could have accidentally stumbled upon his new favourite. She had no frame of reference. Toast, cornflakes, eggs? Oatmeal struck her as a good neutral option, but it wasn’t exactly appetising to look at. In fact, it was off-putting at best. Still, it would be filling and nutritious, and with enough seasoning it might just pass inspection.

Filling two bowls as the dispenser artfully went about its duty, she turned to hunt down intact mugs. If she was going to get back to her old ways of meticulously picking through the finest of details, she was going to sate her old coffee habit, too. Placing the piping-hot bowls of ornate grey mush onto a tray, she swapped the coffee mugs onto the dispenser’s rack and called up two Long Blacks. After a moment’s consideration she threw a jar of sugar onto the tray too, silently thankful for the rich folk’s expensive taste only for the fact that she had a predilection for the taste of the big, chunky brown crystals over sachets of over-processed white grain.

The Engineer had climbed out from under the duvet by the time she returned to the table, tray in hand; she immediately noted he’d gone to the trouble of folding it, dropping it neatly at one end of the couch as he rubbed at both eyes with the heels of his palms. Something told her hypersleep was easier to wake up from – or, at least, that he was more used to it. Staring down at the tray with sleepy disinterest, he huffed softly before being rocked by another debilitating yawn.

Pushing a bowl, a spoon and a mug of coffee toward him, she set about prepping her own meal; she didn’t hesitate in digging a significant spoonful of sugar from the jar, sprinkling it over the top of her porridge with pointed determination before hacking at the side of the mound of goo and promptly shoving it into her mouth. A swift swig of coffee followed, though she found herself all but choking on the intensity of the brew. This was not the freeze-dried swill she was used to gulping down on the run on the way to a dig.

Watching her with semi-conscious trepidation, the Engineer had simply sat half-slumped as she set about ploughing her mouth full. After a moment spent what she could only decide was chewing on his bottom lip or _something_ , he finally reached down and cautiously plucked the cup from the table. It looked more like a ceramic flute than a mug pinched between his immense fingers, and she found herself wondering if she should have made the effort to find a larger vessel.

One restrained sip from the mug left him looking as though he’d bitten into a lemon. He plopped it back onto the table with an unimpressed grunt, lower eyelids twitching as he tried to clear the taste from his mouth. _Yep, that’ll wake you up._

Remembering her own recent reaction to the potency of the drink, she demonstratively grabbed the sugar jar and twisted it open again, briefly making eye contact with the enormous creature as she piled a heaped teaspoon’s worth of crystals into the mug and stirred, before offering both to her guest. A second gulp of the dark brew slid down like velvet, even though a small voice in the back of her head that sounded distinctly like Charlie’s began to scold her for defiling a perfectly good coffee with an excess of sugar.

She clearly hadn’t quite earned his trust, yet; lips pursed thin in thought, the Engineer poked at the crystals with the spoon for a period before pressing an index finger against the few he’d caught at the tip of the utensil and gingerly putting them in his mouth. He sucked on them for a while, expression relaxing as they dissolved – shortly after, he proceeded to follow her example and dropped two excessively heaped scoops into the mug, stirred, and watched them dissolve into the swill with intrigue.

Having half-finished both her coffee and her oatmeal by the time he had begun to hesitantly poke at the grey blob with the larger spoon, Shaw opted against continuing her frantic pace and instead turned her attention back to the stack of magazines at the far end of the table; pushing her meal to the side, she grabbed three of the _Nat Geos_ on the top and began thumbing through them, leaving two of them open on spreads depicting edge-to-edge photos of ruins as she came across them. The third she continued to pick through as the Engineer set about eating, quickly picking up pace as the featureless, unappetising look of the meal yielded to the flavour of apple and cinnamon.

Having found another relevant spread fairly quickly, she placed the ageing, yellowing magazine down on the table and reached for several more; by this point, she noticed, her guest had set about knocking back his coffee in one large gulp and had since begun carefully sniffing the contents of the other bottles scattered across the table. Plain old water had apparently found favour, and after a test sip poured into the dregs of the coffee mug, he’d refilled and skulled it twice before turning his attention back to what remained of his serving of porridge. He seemed entirely uninterested in her work, unsurprisingly.

Ancient forms of Greek and Macedonian, a small snapshot of Biblical Hebrew, she felt like these may be dead-ends. The Engineer had grazed over them momentarily, his disinterest rather telling. Closing the lot of them and thumbing through the next four magazines in the stack, she set about at least categorising open leads and discarding more unlikely candidates to the growing pile at the opposite end of the table.

Pausing to finish the rest of her cooling breakfast and another gulp of lukewarm coffee, she left two more articles open in front of her and idly plucked from paragraph to paragraph as her guest refilled what must have been his fourth or fifth mug of water. She idly wondered just how hard hypersleep was on the body compared to the stasis that had damn near ruined her after a mere two years; by now he was significantly more alert, dark eyes having since drifted back outside as the storm raged on, thumbs idly picking at the lip of the mug pressed between both hands. There was the slightest bounce in one of his knees, leaving his right arm jiggling against it. She supposed he was waiting for a break in the weather so he could get the hell off this vessel, likely disoriented by its alienness to him and keen to figure out what had befallen him and his crew.

As she reached for another round of magazines, dropping several on the table as she paused to scrutinise a hot lead, she noted a shuffle against the couch and a hushed whisper; scowling, the Engineer reached down in front of her and carefully plucked one of the _Nat Geos_ from the mess, bringing it to his face with both hands and staring intently at the cover. She hoped the scowl meant he was interested and not intent on destroying it – or anything else, for that matter – and cast him a quick glance before returning to her own study. He hadn’t noticed, such was his total absorption in the book.

Placing the current issue on her lap, open on another full spread photograph of ancient ruins, she reached for the next and thumbed through as the Engineer did the same, scowl deepening and jaw falling slack as he delicately fanned through the pages, pausing occasionally to scrutinise a page, silently mouthing words to himself. She soon lost interest in what she was doing, finding herself entranced as she observed her guest, gazing in wonder as he apparently did the same. Catching a glimpse of the cover behind his long, thick fingers, she felt her throat tighten in excitement – there it was, that was the lead she needed. A short article on the lost Sumerian language was what he had likely stumbled upon, and the cover art for that particular issue was a snapshot of an ancient tablet that had been unearthed more than a century ago...undoubtedly obscure, she hoped against hope there was at least one other magazine in the stack that covered the topic. She set about rifling through, feverishly scanning cover after cover before discarding them in a pile beside the shrinking stack as they yielded everything except what she was looking for.

Deep scowl still welded above wide eyes, the Engineer had fixated on a spread displaying an assortment of ancient tablets, their text barely legible with age. _Good, this will keep him busy for a while._

Shaw was barely able to contain her excitement as she happened upon an older magazine depicting several related languages; cursing softly but emphatically as she grabbed the issue and rifled through it, she skimmed through the first article she came across as the Engineer snapped his attention to the tiny creature in her sudden increase in activity, before tilting and lowering his head to catch a glimpse of the cover she was holding, staring momentarily at it, then back at her, jaw still slack as he returned to staring at the pages in his grasp.

The lifeboat rocked again beneath the wind as she murmured to herself, totally absorbed in the montage a few pages further along. He, too, had become engrossed again, silently mouthing words – or mere sounds, perhaps – as he squinted at the eroded lexicons chipped into the photographed stone. The broad dot gain of the magazine surely wasn’t helping, even as he angled the page in the bright overhead lights. It was a shame he’d chosen one of the older magazines to inspect, having been produced back when printers relied on rolling pages through a series of presses with data etched into giant sheets, each with its own colour. It made for a messy result when scrutinised, especially with details as small as these.

He murmured something with a deep, growling whisper as he angled the issue again; she froze halfway through turning a page, reflexively whipping her attention to the huge, pale humanoid. Whatever he’d said seemed vaguely familiar, nestled in the vestiges of her mind, conjuring up memories of the days of writing her Master’s thesis, staggering about campus as a caffeine-fuelled zombie, head full of rocks – the historical and metaphorical kind – and oblivious to her surroundings as one might expect. “Say that again,” she all but whispered.

Black eyes once again upon her, his gaze probed her for a heartbeat, picking her apart. He drew a breath and spoke again, hushed and deep, mostly repeating what he’d just said as he poked at the tablets depicted in the spread with a long index finger; amongst the foreign gibberish, this time she picked up that one familiar word. It had been a strange, nearly-incomprehensible pronunciation of _Atra-Hasis_.

Her eyes just about rolled out of her skull as she glanced back down at the page. The featured image was, in fact, one of the tablets depicting the _Epic of Atra-Hasis_ , while the image immediately to the right was a grainy photo of one of the Sumerian King Lists. He murmured something else she had no hope of understanding before trailing off, gaze falling to the book in her lap. She found herself poking at the page in his hand, resisting the urge to go on a long, winding diatribe about the article in a language he would be equally lost in as she was his, settling with acknowledging the content quietly. “That’s part of the _Epic of Atra-Hasis_ , yeah...you can read that?”

The Engineer flinched almost imperceptibly as she repeated the one word he recognised; regarding her for an extended, wide-eyed moment, he hesitated before gesturing for her to hand him the magazine on her lap. She complied, watching with baited breath as he squinted at the photographs and silently mouthed words in between staccato pauses. If only they had some sort of dictionary…

If only they _what_! Scrambling to her feet with enough vigour to startle her guest, she hurriedly shuffled to the pile of books still spread across the floor, nudging one after another aside with a booted foot. Finding nothing of value, she changed tactics; before long she had set about upturning the bar with a series of crashes and clatters, growling in frustration as nothing came to hand, then turning on a heel and marching toward the bedroom as her search continued.

After upending the book stand on top of the dresser and rifling through the wardrobe, she let out a loud _ah-hah!_ as she finally stumbled upon a large digital tablet lying amongst unrelated clutter in one of the bedside drawers. She was back on her feet and all but running back out to the main room as she stabbed at the power button, blissfully unaware of the Engineer gawping at her as she threw herself back down on the couch with gusto.

“Where is it, where is it,” she breathed as she poked at menu after menu on the glowing display. For as much data as these confounded things could hold, they hadn’t made it easy to navigate – even after nearly a hundred years of similar technology being available. Knees jiggling as she slid the tip of her finger about the display with growing excitement and impatience, she happened upon what she was hoping would be there almost purely by chance. Another loud _hah!_ escaped her, and she began scrolling through the long, exhaustive list of foreign words the tablet had burped up after a moment of hanging, frozen, on the menu screen.

How had she not thought of this before?

The Engineer’s intense gaze had flitted back and forth between the book and the tablet a dizzying number of times before he’d quietly cleared his throat. Complete absorbed in the task at hand, she hardly noticed the noise and kept scrolling; expelling a sigh after a drawn-out pause, he reached across the table and gently tapped the back of her hand with two fingers.

She flinched hard enough to draw a loud gasp, staring back at him with wide-eyed surprise; the contact had been unexpected, and even at the best of times she would have jumped, let alone while she was completely enveloped by an all-consuming project. Wasting little time, he offered the flat palm of his left hand, holding it parallel to the table; he pinched the index and middle fingers of his right against the thumb, rocking them back and forth against his palm as if scribbling something with a pen.

A pen and paper... _genius!_

Offering an understanding nod, she flew to her feet again and skittered toward the bar. Surely someone had left something to write on aboard this godforsaken barge. Upturning the bar yielded somewhat more luck this time, with an A4 pad emblazoned with Weyland Corp branding quickly finding favour; she tossed it on top of the bar as she continued her search, rummaging through the drawers once more with increasing fervour as not one single pen made its presence known. Cursing under her breath, she set about hunting through the rest of the ship, skimming through the pile of books on the other side of the room again before moving to the bedroom, the bathroom, back out over the piano, and, after sucking in a breath, through the ruined medbay.

Of all the places to find a stash of cheap, Weyland-branded ballpoints, why did it have to be the medbay?

Hurrying back to the table with a handful of pens, she skidded to a halt as she remembered the pad still sitting on the bar; dropping the pens on top of one of the many stacks of magazines strewn about the surface amongst bowls and coffee cups, she turned on a heel and marched back to the bar, retrieved the pad of letterheads, and sat back down with a breathless heave as she handed it to the Engineer.

He quickly grasped one of the pens, fumbling with it briefly before finding purchase against the rubbery grip; as many of the items aboard had, having been designed exclusively for Human use, the silvery, plastic tool seemed comically small and awkward to use in his immense grasp. His fingers fell still the moment he pressed the tip against the pad; he pinched his lower lip between his teeth, eyes darting about the blank page before glancing back and forth between the white expanse and the magazine pages scattered across the table below his knees. After momentarily lifting the pen and pressing it back against the page, he fell still again, scowling at the tiny implement pinched between his fingers, seemingly at a loss.

Shaw considered tugging the pad free and having a go herself, but was immediately struck by a looming vacancy herself; what on _Earth_ did she even want to write? She’d been so full of questions since she first stumbled upon the ancient inscriptions, bubbling with _when_ and _how_ and _why_ , but not a single one came to mind when faced with the most vague of chances that one of her questions might even reach one of her fabled Engineers. Shit, she didn’t even know where to _start_.

All of the _‘w/h’_ questions, and not one seemed suitable. Barking demands had ended poorly with their first attempt to say the least, and it was patently obvious a different approach would be required in the here and now. The selfishness of their first encounter still burned in her mind as the Engineer opposite her struggled to put thoughts to words; they’d been so hungry for answers that they hadn’t even considered the creature they’d awoken.

_Who._

Yes, that was probably a better place to start.

Fumbling with the tablet again, she scrolled from page to page as she hunted for something that may translate, even if it required a few iterations. He seemed to have responded at least vaguely to the Sumerian scripts, and possibly some scraps of Akkadian that had appeared alongside them, so she reasoned she would first give the former a chance.

She motioned for him to hand her the pad with a tap against its top corner; after a moment’s consideration he passed it to her, watching intently as she bounced the top of the pen against it before flipping it, pinching the rubber grip between her fingers, and carefully scratching the lexicons she’d found amongst screeds of others on the tablet display onto the paper as clearly and accurately as she could.

Upon finishing, she realised how God-awful they looked, cringed somewhat, and handed the pad back to him, hoping she’d guessed the words _‘who’_ and _‘name’_ at least somewhat correctly.

He scowled at the haphazardly-assembled characters for an aeon before glancing back at her, jabbing their forms with an index finger that he then pointed at his own chest. His scowl had become more of an intent, quizzical look of almost-understanding.

She nodded emphatically, unable to suppress a grin.

Pausing for thought, he eventually began scratching at the pad below her scrawl, stopping when he realised no ink was making it to the page. _She’d clicked the other end_ , he seemed to realise, before doing the same and making a second attempt. The characters he drew were certainly not of the languages she’d studied, but they were strikingly similar – similar enough that she now understood why he had reacted to the magazine articles with such intensity. As slowly and clearly as he could, he enunciated something that sounded like _zuh-eel_ to her uninitiated ears; she mouthed the syllables back to him clumsily as he handed her the pad, though he tugged it back with a thoughtful scowl after her stunned attempt at mimicry, adding a second pair of characters below those he’d just written after briefly scrutinising the magazine spread closest to him.

Taking the pad back from him, she dissected the characters briefly before turning to the tablet and hunting for their translations. After a significant period of scrolling before the Engineer’s patient gaze, she found a match for both characters; _zà_ , the border, outskirts, frontier; _íl_ , to lift, bear, carry or endure. A voyager, in a breath. It sounded more like a title than a name, she reasoned, but she could be wrong.

Sucking in a breath, she attempted a second enunciation of the characters. “Za’il.”

Apparently she’d met his approval, as his expression softened with a nod. After a moment’s consideration he gestured with a finger toward the first characters she’d written, then pointed it at her. _Asking the same of her._

“Elizabeth,” she mouthed slowly and clearly, pressing a hand to her sternum.

His jaw hung slack after mouthing his way through half of it, eyes glazed. _Probably a bit of a mouthful for the uninitiated,_ she mused. Quickly flipping through the glossary still displayed on the tablet, she went about printing the syllables with the full knowledge they would end up meaningless despite being pronounceable. “This will be nonsense, but it might help…”

Squinting at her new scrawl for another extended period, he gave it another awkward, almost shy attempt. “ _Eh-LEE-zuh...beh?”_

“Elizabeth,” she repeated again with a warm smile. “Uh...Ellie. Ellie is fine.”

“ _Eh-lee_ ,” he quietly mused, staring down at the page before meeting her gaze once again. He’d followed up with something in his own tongue, his expression almost feigning a smile but falling away with a thought-laden sigh before his lips could curl upward. In the next breath it became serious, his scowl returning as he scratched at the pad in an unmarked section further down.

She set about translating as he handed it back to her. _Why are… why are you…_ the first characters were easy, but the final one held its secrets for a frustrating period as she scrolled back and forth, back and forth, until…

She swallowed despite herself, lingering over the translation before meeting the Engineer’s gaze, now terrifyingly intent.

_Why are you here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wao. So, we're here.
> 
> It's worth noting that this point that I'm obviously and unashamedly late to the party; many stories have been written in this fandom before, and quite a few have leveraged the same historical sources for their Engineer lore. As much as I didn't want to stand in the shadows of better writers before me, having conducted similar research, it just makes so much sense - the sounds of the languages, their historical roots and contexts, and the beautiful way it all just slots into place. This isn't forgetting, as I understand it, the deleted language scenes in the movie leveraging Sumerian(?) language in the first place.
> 
> So, some familiar words may start showing up soon.
> 
> I feel like this story may close faster than I originally planned, it's not exactly an epic; frankly, that won't be a bad thing, given my propensity to drone on for hundreds of thousands of words and never actually FINISH a story.


	5. Contempt

If this mother-of-all-misadventures had taught her nothing else, it had most certainly taught her that she was still capable of being startled into gobsmacked, brain-dead silence. It was as though the gears in her head had ground to a screeching halt, sand thrown amongst them by none other than the Gods she had sought with a million questions on the tip of her tongue. How ironic that he had, in fact, been the first to ask a question – _that_ question – and how it had completely knocked the wind from her sails, wilting before the black of his eyes.

The intensity of his stern expression never wavered as he watched her lips flail uselessly. There was fire in his gaze, the same fire she’d seen ignite when it had finally dawned on him that there were _intruders_ on his ship; unmoving, the creature’s demeanour had changed so rapidly she couldn’t stem the tide of adrenaline that flooded her veins once more, mind concocting yet more ways in which she could meet a grisly end.

_Silly girl, you thought you’d earned his trust. Why on Earth did you think that?_

Rather preferring not to get another taste of the creature’s deadly anger, she pried her deer-in-the-headlights gawp from his black glare and focused on the page in front of her. A small part of her that had broken away from the moment, standing alongside her as her hands shook, mused the reactions of people back on Earth having brought with her a pad of scribbles between her and a creature that had never set foot on the planet; the rest was at this point absolutely convinced that moment would never come, and that her time was now.

How many more times would she stand before the gates, waiting for them to swing by and let her in?

More importantly, why _was_ she here?

_To ask questions._

_What questions?_

_Why they made us._

She pursed her lips tightly. _That’s a bit heavy a conversation for right now, isn’t it?_

She squeezed the pen grip. His glare narrowed.

_Answer him, you damn fool._

Fingers shaking as her breath hitched, she fumbled with both the pen and tablet as she took a wild guess at a more diplomatic answer than what she had attempted on the bridge of his vessel.

His scowl morphed into a perplexed squint as she handed him her answer.

_To find you._

Glancing twice between the tiny Human and the page before him, he seemed as much at a loss for words as she had. Eventually he cast his gaze outside, scrutinising the landscape outside that had gradually become faintly visible in the dying gale; the storm would surely have dissipated enough to be passably safe to be outside in soon. Sucking in a breath, he quickly scrawled a response.

_Why me?_

She found herself chewing on her bottom lip once she’d translated his question. It struck her as enormously selfish at this point, in the context of another attempt at First Contact, to be asking her own questions and speaking from her own perspective; she was the _only_ Human representative here, before the _only_ survivor of another, and with that, her horizons were suddenly so far-flung she could no longer see them. It was hardly as liberating as she imagined it would be.

It led her to wonder just why Humans did _any_ of what they did. ‘Because we can’ was always the most easily-cited reason, but it would translate terribly. ‘To see what would happen’ was a plebeian way of posing a hypothesis but belied the intelligence that went with the latter. ‘Because we wanted to learn something’ seemed far more honest, but a little saccharine. What it all boiled down to, she realised, was curiosity.

_To find anyone. We are curious._

His scowl all but completely obscured a thousand emotions as he picked the page apart with his dark gaze; for a brief moment he seemed almost saddened by what he was reading, but a perplexed disbelief dominated his pale features. The air hung like stone as multiple questions seem to fade from his lips as soon as they formed. That _wasn’t_ the reaction she was hoping for.

He murmured something under his breath, then heaved a sigh into his hand as he slid it down his face, pressing it against his mouth in agonised thought. An overwhelming sensation of foreboding overcame her, dousing her in cold, sickening guilt. She felt like a child that had been caught stealing for the first time, facing the ire of a parent that didn’t even know where to begin with discipline. If this had been any situation less important, she might have cried. She had half a mind to scrawl the word _sorry_ on the page has he stared down at it.

Aeons passed before he pressed the pen to the page again, though he barely got halfway through writing a response before immediately scratching over the top of it with hasty, irritated strokes that embossed the page beneath the metal nib’s pressure. What he eventually wrote was a longer message, filling the rest of the page; this was going to take her a while to translate.

Hesitantly accepting the pad as he handed it back, she set about deciphering the foreign scribble; this time, she wrote the English translations below each character, knowing she hadn’t a hope of remembering what she’d found three words earlier as she sought the next.

_You shouldn’t be here. This place is dangerous. How are you still alive?_

Immediately recalling the number of times she very nearly hadn’t been, she sucked in a breath as she tried to think of an appropriate response. _Brute force and ignorance?_ No, that was entirely inappropriate – honest, but inappropriate. Dangerous had been honest, too; they had set off with the promise of knowledge, hoping to cash in on an ancient invitation from a far more advanced species that had, once upon a time, shown Humanity plenty of love and patience. It had been on her word too, she mused glumly. They were here because of _her_ hard work, _her_ discoveries, and _her_ theories.

Well, she had been right about one thing. There were Engineers here, long ago. Unfortunately, it appeared that invitation was no longer valid.

A far more recent magazine sitting at the top of the stack on the far side of the table caught the corner of her eye. She knew what she wanted to say, and grasped at the tablet once more, pen in hand; flipping the page over, she pressed the nib to a fresh leaf.

_We wanted to meet our creators._

She handed the pad back to the Engineer, quickly followed by the _Nat Geo_ that had caught her attention. The cover was a dark, somewhat moody photo stained in night-time blues, its narrow focus honing in on the weathered lines of a cave drawing that was all-too-familiar; one man standing among several far smaller, pointing to the stars. How she missed this the first time was beyond her; she had _been on that dig_ – this was _her work_.

Jaw slack, he seemed to stare at the magazine cover without comprehension; eventually his blank expression morphed into another disbelieving scowl, apparently refusing to believe the words she’d written on the page, either. She swallowed, wondering if this was when she ended up like David, wanting to take it all back, wishing she could have written something far less honest, wishing her blind curiosity and desperation to believe hadn’t sealed her fate and put her on on this horrendous, drawn-out suicide mission.

A laugh snapped her from her anxiety-ravaged thoughts. It was a harsh, hollow, humourless laugh, devoid of amusement, echoing as a silent shake in his chest as he ran his hand over his face. He stood without warning, rolling his head toward the ceiling in apparent exasperation and immediately paced away, mumbling – cursing – under his breath as one hand clawed at his head.

Indignant tears stung her eyes as she watched him, aghast; he paused halfway across the room, turning to stare back at her as he shook his head like a scorned lover, sucked in his bottom lip as his vision trailed elsewhere, and resumed pacing as he spoke, at length, in his own tongue. His gaze seemed to scan the length and breadth of the room, back and forth, lost in a world of contradictions, half-truths and wildly unreasonable aliens. He shook his head at the half-stacked bookshelf before getting briefly lost in the tendrils of crystal hanging from the ceiling beside his head, the myriad of bottles stacked behind the bar, the imposing frame of the piano.

He wasn’t angry, she soon realised. He was _disappointed._

The expression on his face when he finally looked back at her stung more than she was prepared for. Despite herself the tears lurched free, rolling down her cheeks in hot, thick rivers down her cheeks as her chest silently spasmed. She gripped at her face with both hands, unable to face the creature. She knew that look. _God_ , she knew that look.

It was the look her Uncle had etched across his greying, wrinkled features when she announced she wanted to follow in her late father’s footsteps and pursue Archaeology instead of something ‘more sensible’, something that would ‘give her a nice, easy life’. It was the look her Master’s professor had shot her when she first posed her Thesis topic, before gently but firmly pressing her in a different, less outlandish direction. It was the look, very much the look, her dig leader hadn’t even tried to disguise when she first posed her theory on the true origins of life on Earth; the thoughts had just slipped past her lips as they formed, and he had quickly shot her down with a detailed rant about the Theory of Evolution until she was so humiliated she’d cried.

Charlie had given her that same look when she spoke to him later on, but Charlie had been different. He’d placed a hand in her hair, kissed her cheek, and told her to think it through more carefully before posing it to her next audience – that she needed to keep her own thoughts from tarnishing people's’ opinions of her in the field, hit ‘em all at once when they were fully formed. She’d cried as they made love that night, though she could never decide if it was from the persistent humiliation that stood in her shadow wherever she went, or whether she’d never had someone respond to her thoughts like that before, instead of outright dismissing them as folly.

The look on the Engineer’s face was a twisted but restrained gawp of patronising disgust and vague, humourless amusement. She was so, so used to that look; she had even weathered it aboard the Prometheus, but she had expected it from a ragtag group of scientists that had just been told that Evolution was a lie. She may as well have stood in the middle of a Church and declared life to be random, godless chance that had rolled in their favour.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured despite herself as her voice, wet and wavering, hitched in her throat. “I’m sorry.”

Clearly he had not expected her reaction, either; his expression softened as his shoulders fell almost imperceptibly, regarding the sobbing creature in total silence. There was _no way_ he could have understood how much this had meant to them, to _her_. His own animated, insulting reaction had been enough evidence of that. Outside of her own sobbing, clawing at her cheeks, she wondered just how rejection by something she could barely communicate with had _hurt_ so much.

The Engineer appeared to give the room one last, disbelieving scan before near-silently pacing back toward the table and retrieving the pad he’d cast aside. Through her tears he seemed to cast her an almost guilty glance, hesitating as he observed her before pressing the pen to paper. Once he’d slipped it onto her lap, he stood again and stepped toward the windows, releasing a heavy sigh as he stared out at the landscape beyond the lifeboat.

The wind had all but died in the immediate area, scrabbling weakly at fine dust and gently scattering it between the chunks of debris the storm had brought with it. By now enough particulate matter had settled that the towers were visible in the distance, beyond the hulk of the crashed but remarkably intact vessel almost out of view from the bay windows, debris fragments pulled loose in the fiery impact and ensuing crash glinting in the afternoon sun. His dark eyes had fixated upon its haunting form, teeth tugging at his bottom lip as ideas undoubtedly raced through his mind.

Shaw had somehow wrangled some semblance of coherency amongst her self-absorbed grief, smearing the tears from her eyes with the back of one hand as she diligently set to work translating the Engineer’s latest message. He didn’t move from the window the entire time she worked, though he seemed to be observing something different every time she glanced back at him. At first, he appeared to marvel at the pink-hued gas giant swallowing a segment of the sky above, tinting the blue sky with hints of violet beyond the thin scattering of cloud in the wake of the storm. The immense mountains in the distance, almost beyond what could be seen from the windows, ensnared him next, albeit briefly. As she managed to narrow down the last few words, his shoulders slumped as the bare ground within the sprawling valley before them met his gaze. One hand pressed against the glass as his forehead hung beside it, she could only wonder what was going through his mind.

His message said exactly what she had suspected before she was even halfway through deciphering it.

_You came to the wrong place for that._

She ejected the pad from her grasp with an exhausted, defeated sigh that she could have sworn came from her toes. The awkward scrawlings of two creatures unfamiliar with their chosen common language stole the last of the life from her fingers as they slid across the table in a flurry of leaves; she slumped heavily against the back of the couch, too defeated to squeeze another tear out, too humiliated to find words to speak.

The Engineer eventually reached down toward the table, flipping leaves of scrawled paper from the top of the pad and tugging a fresh page free. She heard him pick up a pen and wander back to the window, only peering up with puffy eyes when the sound of rushed writing scratched at her ears. He had pressed the sheet of paper against the glass, pausing now and then to stare back at the ship before engaging in another spurt of hurried scribbling. For all intents and purposes he appeared to be composing a list, the scrawled lexicons too small and too haphazard for her to have a hope of translating as they flowed down the page. Her tired eyes soon realised they weren’t Sumerian, either; they must be in his native tongue.

Her blood froze for a terrifying moment as he cast her a dark look over his shoulder, seemingly sizing her up for a bemused few seconds before returning his attention back to the task at hand. _What was he doing?_

As quickly as he started, he finished scratching away at the sheet and tossed the pen onto the table, folding the list in half, then in half again, forming a tidy rectangle that he then tucked up the ruined sleeve of his biosuit alongside his bicep, clear of the tear in the material. He stepped past the table and couches with several inhumanly broad paces, paused, turned back, and hastily scribbled two characters on the almost-full top page of the pad.

The first she recognised by now; the second, she quickly found. It was surprising how fast one could adapt, once one was familiar with the source material.

_Stay here._

He had already turned to walk toward the airlock by the time she deciphered the message. “Wait,” she murmured, casting a quick glance at the shadows outside as they began to stretch in the afternoon sun. He ignored her; she sat up straight. “Wait, where are you going?”

Still ignoring her he paced past the bar, tilting his head away from the chandelier crystals that brushed against his shoulder.

“Za’il, wait!” She all but shouted his name, or at least what she hoped was his name, as he prepared to duck for the airlock tunnel.

He froze, only turning as she scrambled to her feet; confusion twisted his pale features as she skittered across the deck, but as she came within a few metres of him, he responded with something in his own language, deep and authoritative.

Eyes as frustrated as they were pleading, she spoke again. “Where are you going? Why don’t you take me with you, I can h-...”

Repeating himself, the Engineer pointed over her head toward the couch. She _knew_ she was being told to stay put, but that _wasn’t good enough_. She waved an arm in the direction of the airlock instead. “Look, it’s different out there to what you remember, and if you’re going back to your ship I’d like to retr-...”

Scowling, he repeated himself once more, punctuated by an clumsy _Lee-zuh-beh_ , before adding something else in a distinctly terse tone. It wasn’t his words that startled her, though; it was the two huge, white hands that grasped her upper arms delicately but phenomenally firmly, pushing her back toward the couch with strength she found incomprehensible from a humanoid, resisting her writhing as if she were a ragdoll. Her boots squeaked against the glossy floor as she lost her footing, but she wasn’t dragged backward for very long before being lifted off the floor and unceremoniously plopped onto the couch in a mass of limbs and hair.

Staring up at him with aghast and insulted chagrin, mouth open, she tried – and failed – to come up with anything to protest with. As much as she wanted to tag along, it had become patently obvious at this point that he was so much her physical superior she may as well give up. It was little wonder her crewmates had perished when he had barely flinched. Clearly he had realised the same, thinking little of her protestations and shifting her about like an inanimate object.

He cast her one last warning glance before keying the exit for the airlock and stepping out into the afternoon sun. As the doors slid shut behind him, returning the lifeboat to complete, deadly silence, she wondered if the Engineers were more resistant to the effects of carbon dioxide, or if he was going to suffer, unaware of what the atmosphere was like out there after several millennia.

As much as her ego stung from today’s less-than-ideal exchange, and as much as her arms burned from where he had pressed his thumbs against her biceps with enough force to bruise them _and then lifted her entire weight off the ground_ , she couldn’t find it in her heart to hate him for it.

_You better come back alive._

* * *

The afternoon shadows had grown distinctly longer before she had decided what to do with herself; kissing the calm, still valley beyond the lifeboat in gold, the sun had since begun its final descent toward night. Arcing toward the heavens, the mighty snow-capped peaks had taken on more of a vibrant orange beneath the glow of the gas giant that had all but disappeared from view – without the constant wind and rain, funneled into a damn hurricane in the confines of the valley they’d crashed in, there was something undeniably, insanely _beautiful_ about this place, formed by tectonic rage over the aeons and now proudly on display for one, lone Human.

She had since busied herself assessing the damage to the lifeboat, setting the systems for a deep scan and displaying the litany of warnings on the tablet. Sitting against the window to catch the last of the afternoon sun, she picked through the worst of the errors one by one, scanning through the vessel’s blueprints for reference with each that came to familiarise herself with the location and nature of each incident. It soon became apparent that the engines had sustained some damage after the vessel had ejected, with one of the port-side nacelles likely being smashed beyond feasible repair. There was more than enough water, food and power for an extended stay if she _did_ have to patch it up enough to get her free of the moon’s orbit, but she hardly thought she had enough sanity left in the tank to withstand that sort of project. Besides, it would mean she would be relegated to stasis for the trip home, which she hardly fancied as a concept.

Forcing herself to her feet with an embattled groan, she tossed the tablet aside and staggered toward the food dispenser. It seemed she would dine alone tonight, and frankly, at this point, it would be a welcome change. Her arms still ached from where the Engineer had picked her up and dragged her across the floor, her head ached from thinking and crying and being lost in despair, and it was all she could to do resist the urge to suck down an entire bottle of liquor herself and be damned the consequences.

Chocolate mousse and ice cream for dessert it was. _Be damned the consequences._

Throwing her feet on top of the magazines still scattered across the table, she set about demolishing the gooey muck piled high in her bowl with determined annoyance, washing it down with a tall, strong glass of what remained of the Gin. They made odd bedfellows, but stuff it – she was alone, there wasn’t a soul to judge her, and she would eat whatever she pleased.

Oh, but she _had_ been judged today – quite harshly. She knew when she was being determined to be an idiotic zealot and a dreamer. It wasn’t like it was a particularly odd occurrence in her life. She just hadn’t prepared herself to get more of the same from an _alien_. It was as if it was her lot in life to be flogged before the crowd for daring to speak.

She bit down on the spoon angrily as she stewed on the day’s events, entertaining the growing fury at the Engineer’s smug treatment of her once they had started to communicate. She almost preferred him before she’d peeled back the layers, wishing she could bask in that pleasant ignorance that had allowed her to project _human_ feelings onto him – empathy, concern, caution. Somehow, in their forced closeness, she had forgotten just how alien he truly was.

Or, perhaps, she was missing a piece of the puzzle. Perhaps her poorly-articulated responses to his questions had fallen foul of the mark just as they had aboard the Engineer ship, but he had actually _tried_ to understand instead of reacting with violence as he had the first time. He’d told told her the moon was dangerous, which wasn’t something one would logically tell another they wanted dead, or didn’t care either way. Regardless of how obvious the statement had been, surely he was far more knowledgeable as to why. It certainly gave credence to his manhandling her back onto the couch and refusing to let her leave. He could have snapped her neck instead, or _thrown_ her across the room, but all he did was leave bruises.

Damnit, it was so _easy_ to judge him. She _still_ had no clue as to his motivations, or even _who_ he was, apart from an arbitrary name. By now she was certain he was the wrong person to have encountered throughout all of this, but it wasn’t like they’d had a choice. The others were all long dead, to the point of fossilising.

Without a clue how long it would be before she would see the surviving Engineer again, or whether he intended to come back at all, she pondered the validity of penning a somewhat more coherent message. Maybe she could tell him more about her people, ask him about his, explain that they really did just want to find out more about their place in the galaxy. Weyland aside, they had meant no malice. They were scientists, not military grunts in search of conquest.

Hunting down the pad and a pen, she set to work trying to word a far more articulate message. She tore the top two pages free, dropping them on the table before scuffing toward the piano and perching on the stool. Though the lighting on this side of the room was less than ideal, at least the cover over the keys was at a better angle to write with; her back and what remained of her wound had since tired of slouching over a coffee table for hours.

Rather than distract herself with translations straight off the bat, she opted to start in English and work her way back from there. This would take hours, if not days, but something told her she would have all the time in the world to think about this between now and _whatever the Hell was next_.

Sucking in a breath, she pressed the nib to the paper.

_I feel like we got off to a bad start. I’d like to try again. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, and…_

Pursing her lips thin, she squinted at the line for a moment before scrubbing it out. What was this, a highschool make-up?

_I hope we didn’t offend you with the way we woke you._

Nope, nope, nope. Scowling, she scrubbed that line out, too. _Of course we fucking offended him._

Drawing a breath, she tried again.

_I realise we have very badly failed at First Contact with your people, and for that I apologise. I would like to try again, and introduce ourselves properly._

Better. She pressed on.

_We are a very curious species, and we have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. In the last few years we finally invented the technology necessary to travel faster than light, and it has made our curiosity more intense than ever. For centuries we have wondered if we were alone in the universe, and recently we realised we weren’t. This is why we sought your people._

She half-wondered if it was worth elaborating on Humanity’s discovery of his kind further, but it wasn’t ultimately important. Or was it?

He had clearly been fascinated by multiple aspects of the lifeboat in his relentless pacing, and it hadn’t been what she’d expected. He had ignored her more than he’d paid her any attention, and he’d shown only passing interest in the food she’d offered. She’d caught him thumbing through books at one point, squinting at their contents before quietly shelving them; the magazines had clearly consumed him once he found something familiar within. The chandeliers, the paintings, the sculptures had drawn him in repeatedly, halting him in his infernal pacing for swathes of time.

Expressions of the Human condition that did not require words, every item that had piqued his interest was of some kind of cultural significance…

Straining for words despite the thoughts becoming cogent, palpable, she stabbed at the pad with keywords as the came, slowly evolving into a haphazard mind-map diagram, lines snaking from one concept to the next as they flowed from her tired brain. A mighty, almost debilitating yawn rocked her without warning, mouth wide enough that she could almost place her hand inside it; she needed to wring out as many ideas as she could before she fell asleep, intending to jog her memory tomorrow morning after completing a survey of the lifeboat’s exterior and planning a repair and escape plan.

Slumping on the piano stool as her eyes began to droop, she propped her head against her left wrist against her cheek; the ideas, as hazy as they had suddenly become, kept coming, and she _had_ to get as much down as possible. Gravity swayed and lurched beneath her as the day’s grasp upon her refused to yield, and before long, it was not just a battle to keep a good grip on the pen, but to merely keep her eyes open.

_Maybe I’ll just close my eyes. Just for a bit,_ she reasoned as she placed her head against the piano cover. _Just a few minutes._

* * *

The familiar _hiss_ of an airlock activating snapped her from her sleep. Dazed, squinting in the light, she glanced about the room in a fuzzy stupor. One hand sleepily clawed the mouthful of hair from her lips whilst the other groped at the surface she’d fallen asleep on, immediately realising just how _cramped_ she had become; snatching a yawn, she stretched long and hard with both arms above her head. Reaching back down to rub her face, she became aware that she had the edge of the bad embossed along her cheek in what was likely a thick, red line.

_Kthunk._

Vibrations rolled through the deck as something exceptionally heavy landed on it by the airlock. Shifting on her seat, she craned her neck past the piano to catch a glimpse of what was going on; she assumed the Engineer had returned, but hadn’t the foggiest what he was up to.

_Thud._

Another heavy object hit the deck, followed by a heavy _clomp_ of a large boot stepping up and boarding the small craft. As the airlock hissed shut, Shaw was aware of the adrenaline starting to creep into her bloodstream; fingers jittering at the piano cover, she held her breath as several more boot-steps echoed through the hall leading into the main room.

Her heart caught in her throat as the immense figure of a black-clad humanoid ducked beneath the outer frame of the corridor and stepped into the light. But rather than the dark gaze among pale, translucent skin that she’d come to recognise, she was met with the beady, elephantine visage of an alien _monster._

Jerking away from the piano, she screamed in pure, terrorised fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is progressing far faster than I thought it would, which means...I might actually finish something for once.
> 
> You may notice that while I like Elizabeth to be somewhat a ball of feels, I also like her being able to fend for herself and get-up-and-do-stuff. I also like to maintain the Engineer's rather rough hand because reasons.
> 
> Also, some disambiguation in case anyone is wondering: yes, italics covers emphasis, thought intrusions, and any dialogue that isn't physically spoken in the main story language (English here, thanks to Shaw).
> 
> More to come...I seem to enjoy writing instead of working.


	6. The Bereaved

Heart pounding in her throat, Shaw’s frantic scramble to get _the fuck away_ from whatever had just invaded her space quickly resulted in a flurry of paper amongst arms and legs, the backs of her bare thighs sticking to the piano seat and sending her to ground with an almighty _crash_ , punctuated by the offbeat tinkle of notes echoing through the baby grand’s case. Fingers scratched desperately at the floor with undignified squeaks as she soon found her back pressed against the wall, wide-eyed and breathless in her panic. Her eyes remained transfixed on the monstrous alien figure as it raised a black hand to its face, and...and…

...and _released the helmet covering his head_.

Relief swamped her shaking body, its panic-stricken rigidity soon giving way to somewhat embarrassed calm. _Damnit,_ she _knew_ what Engineer helmets looked like! Was she really so traumatised by the past few days that she instinctively hit the roof every time she was woken up by anything that wasn’t intimately familiar? Pushing herself to her feet, she offered him an apologetic, lopsided grin as she pushed the hair from her face with a spare hand.

He had barely flinched as she’d overreacted, though her high-pitched wail had jarred him to a halt. Lifting the separated helmet from his face, he regarded her with a startlingly blank expression, gaze lingering only briefly before he unceremoniously dropped the helmet on the deck with a metallic _thunk_ , and shuffled past her as if in a trance.

Carefully watching him as she willed her heart to slow, she could have sworn he looked different. Though he hadn’t seemed the expressive type from the outset, the look welded to his face was drawn at best, tense – but utterly _exhausted_. She noted, as he stepped beneath the harsh lighting only inches from his head, that his eyes seemed narrowed, almost as if swollen half-shut. Lips pressed thin and curled down at the edges, she couldn’t help but feel he was restraining some sort of emotion.

Seemingly ignoring her presence, he staggered toward the bay windows at the far end of the craft, collapsing to his knees the moment he stopped as he heaved a mighty sigh.

Shaw stole a moment to tug the Vickers-sized underpants from her buttocks while he wasn’t watching, quietly observing him from her safehaven beside the piano. Unmoving and apparently unaware of her presence, he continued to stare out the window in a daze as she quietly padded toward him.

Feeling somewhat awkward about simply standing and staring at him, studying him as if a mere _creature_ , she felt the urge to say something, but as her heart rate came back under control, it became obvious that he was unlikely to hear it. Breathing measured but hoarse, he remained slumped against the thick plexiglass, braced against the cold surface with his forehead and one giant, gloved hand just below his face. Dark eyes remained transfixed on the black of night outside; yes, her earlier suspicions had been correct. They _were_ swollen, the lids puffy around a narrowed, thousand-yard gaze.

What the _hell_ had happened?

Thousand-yard gaze…

_No._

_Two-thousand-year gaze_.

Of course. He wouldn’t have had the foggiest how long he’d been under when they’d revived him; he’d been too distracted by the intruders, then too busy trying to pilot the vessel. From there, he’d spent the majority of the past few days aboard the lifeboat alongside her, waiting for the storm to pass. If he’d returned to his ship on his recent outing, which she guessed he had by the two mysterious oversized crates that had appeared onboard by the airlock, then it was likely he’d capitalised on his uninjured and far less dazed condition to do some poking around.

Her blood ran cold at the mere thought. They hadn’t considered that when they decided to revive him either, had they? Blind curiosity had proven itself to be far more dangerous than she could ever have imagined, with yet more ripples of carnage radiating from the initial pebble-drop of damn-near spontaneous actions. The lone survivor of a two-thousand-year-old catastrophe found himself the unwilling victim of yet another facet of their poor judgement.

What the hell did they _expect_ would happen? How had it not occurred to them that somehow, this poor damned creature would have to come to terms with the fact that he’d been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a world that was no longer his?

More than anything, she wished she could talk to him, reassure him that it would be okay, _it would be okay_ , no matter what happened from here. She felt responsible, all of a sudden, for his welfare – what little of it there was left to speak of. She wished she could say something, _anything_.

The next best would have to suffice.

Silently pacing back to the piano, she retrieved the pad and pen from the floor where she’d thrown it several minutes ago, quietly tearing off the top few sheets to reveal fresh, unmarked paper, then plucked the tablet off the couch as she returned to the Engineer’s side, lingering a cautious distance from him as she wondered what exactly she could say.

 _Hey, we revived you so far into the future that everyone you know is dead and this planet is beyond help, but hey! It’ll be okay!_ Pressing her lips thin, she realised there _was_ nothing she could say to make it better. She _couldn’t_ comfort him, because what had happened to him was _beyond comprehension_.

If there was to be any talking, she realised, it had better come from him.

Quietly stepping closer to the slumped figure, she pressed the pad against the glass a metre or so from his face. At first his trance-like state remained, though after a few drawn-out moments his gaze eventually fell to the paper in front of him. Drained and uncomprehending, his eyes appeared uncharacteristically devoid of life as they finally fell upon hers. Forcing a thin smile that felt like more of a wince, she offered him the pen as she held the pad to the glass. If he didn’t want to talk, he would likely just ignore her. He seemed adept at that.

But he did, so it seemed. Just as she was about to give in and cast it all aside in favour of leaving him alone in his catatonic state, he raised his right hand from the floor and pinched at the pen. It shook in his hand as he fumbled with it, the thick gloves of his armour making it seem even more flimsy and ridiculous than it had before; pressing the tip to the pad, he focused every ounce of what remained of his strength on scrawling a short, untidy message across the page before dropping the pen to the ground and bracing against the window once more.

A quick thumb through the tablet told Elizabeth what she already knew. His message was simple and unambiguous. _Two thousand years._

She’d stared at the Sumerian lexicons for long enough over the past few hours to have memorised exactly what she wanted to say; it was the only _to_ say. Quickly scrawling a response, she slipped the pad back down by his knees before sinking to her own with a shaky sigh.

_I’m sorry._

The Engineer’s face crumbled, contorted with emotion as he pressed his eyes closed; one heavy, singular tear rolled down his cheek as he pressed his head back against the glass, chest quaking with silent agony as he slumped further.

With that, her own resolve collapsed; her vision flooded with fresh tears, tears of guilt as much as anguish, and despite herself her right hand caught his as it slid down the glass, curling around the back of it over his knuckles and around the edge of his palm. Thin and childlike against his huge fingers, she idly doubted he’d even feel them – she gasped when she felt him gently squeeze his fingers around hers.

He barely made a sound as he sobbed, biting back on his breath in an apparent effort to stem the tears and moderate his response, but the unstoppable shaking in his hand gave him away. Time rolled on meaninglessly before the black, starless windows he remained hunched against, oscillating through fits of silent, quaking agony and catatonic staring into the night. _Don’t let go,_ her mind repeatedly told her, no matter how much her arm had long since started to ache. _Never be the first to let go when you’re comforting someone._

She had no idea how long she’d knelt next to the immense creature, clinging to his fingers as he clung to the window. It could have been minutes or hours, but it didn’t matter. No matter how much her back and knees disagreed with being held in this position, as horrendously awkward as her grasp was, she refused to be the one to let go. She had, however, returned to observing as she regained her composure. There was no denying he was in the throes of grief, just as there was no denying the way he was going about it; _they mourn like us, they cry like us,_ she noted. For some reason, that realisation had stung.

At some point he had rolled back from the window, sinking back into somewhat of a hunched foetal position with his back against the couch and his head in his left hand. His right had remained clamped on hers, pinching her tiny fingers as he repositioned himself and drawing them into his palm so they were properly grasping each other in a far more comfortable hand-hold, his thumb idly stroking the back of her hand as he stared into the abyss. By now he was spent, out of tears and out of motivation to move at all; she had long since sunk to the floor too, turning to face him as he’d tugged her down, gently resting her side against the knobbled, plated surface of the armour housing his calf.

More than anything it was the burden of knowing she was a party to this nonsense that wrecked her the most. Arguably the next poor fools to have stumbled upon the planet could have been the ones to have awoken him, or he could have died peacefully in stasis in a few hundred years time; it didn’t change the fact that in the here and the now, _they_ were the ones that had caused this. _They_ were the ones that sealed his fate, but _he_ was the one that had to deal with the consequences.

By now his breathing had slowed and calmed, the tension and defeat having slowly evaporated from his slumped form, hand still gently cradling hers as his eyes remained locked, half-lidded, on the world outside. His head had rolled back to rest against the arm of the couch behind his _two-thousand-year gaze_ , having exchanged his trance-like abyssal catatonia for a more thought-wracked, worried frown. _I’ll bet he feels dreadful,_ she mused, reflecting on how headachy, dehydrated and downright _rotten_ she felt whenever she came unstitched. It had been bad enough the last few days; God knows she’d had a few breakdowns in that period.

Gently squeezing her fingers against his palm as she reached for the pad, discarded barely within her reach, she caught the corner of it and dragged, catching the pen along the way. The tablet came with it too. She felt him move as she twisted around, finally – reluctantly – releasing her fingers, his gaze finally falling upon her as she dragged the whole lot into her lap. Gripping the armoured gloves had left her fingers slick with sweat, and they slid against the pen as she fumbled with the tablet with her other hand. He simply watched, patiently, as she assembled a message for him. She couldn’t be sure, but she had reason to believe her writing in this ancient language had become clearer and less awkward during their exchanges.

His faintly worried expression remained as he read her scrawl, remaining far more still than she could recall him being the entire time she’d been in his presence.

_Would you like a shower?_

Expression softening, he eased out a controlled sigh; he rubbed his face with both hands as he turned to face her, offering her a weak nod. _Another similarity plausible_ , she thought as she stood, offering him a hand. _At least he can’t argue I don’t have decent manners._

Without an ounce of fight left in him, the Engineer simply shadowed Shaw with a slow, plodding shuffle as she led him to the lifeboat’s bathroom facility.

As preposterous as the ostentatious design had seemed to her, the showerhead suddenly seemed that much more sane when put into the context of someone damn-near ten foot tall; broad, recessed into the ceiling, its elaborate ring of nozzles had clearly been designed to imitate heavy forest rain. The more plebeian designs she was accustomed to would barely have scratched the surface with someone of the Engineer’s dimensions, but at a guess, this would be passable.

Weary eyes watched her as she demonstrated the shower controls, unblinking and barely registering what he was being shown in his ruined state; his hands lagged as she handed him a fresh, fluffy blue towel, and it took a few moments of uncomfortable eye contact before he found the strength to offer a nod of understanding. She smiled as reassuringly as she could, patting the dazed creature’s arm as far up as she could reach before politely making an exit and leaving him in peace, hoping he had enough left in the tank to sort the rest out himself.

Sliding the bathroom and bedroom doors closed behind her, Shaw now found herself in the company of silence once more, wondering exactly what she’d do with herself from now on given the recent turn of events. Tonight had...changed things. If anything she found herself feeling vulnerable once more, but not because of the creature’s sheer power; no, it was his apparent _lack_ of power in this given moment that had stunned her, stumbling upon the realisation that _she_ was the one who now wielded the will to live, the instinct to survive. How badly had the Engineer’s will snapped with his horrifying discovery? Would he bounce back onto his feet and soldier on, would he descend into madness? Would he, she shuddered to imagine, take the easy way out and step up to the gates himself?

 _Time will tell,_ she reminded herself. _Just focus on your own survival for the time being; he’ll do whatever he needs to._

 _But what about my answers,_ a voice in her head nagged. _I came here for answers, and so far I’ve got nothing but more questions and dead bodies._

Snatching the dirty dishes from the coffee table with obvious irritation, her mind warred with itself as the familiar hiss and splatter of a shower running several rooms away echoed about the air. _Goddamn you and your answers. He already told you; this is the wrong place, and he’s the wrong person to be asking._

 _So what now then? Fuck off back to Earth and live the rest of your days in disgrace, Doctor?_ Her spitefulness toward herself felt as soothing as it was painful. _What are you going to say about being the only survivor of a trillion-dollar failed mission?_

The lower dishwasher door slammed shut, its crash echoing her contempt with the whole situation. Angry hands grabbed at the clutter across the bar, shoving smaller bowls and utensils into the open upper drawer that awaited them. _Why does any of this matter, anyway? Everyone’s dead, and I was wrong._

Breath hitching in her throat, she swallowed the lump that was forming in her chest. _There’s nothing back there. Everything’s gone. Why bother?_

_I still have questions._

_Goddamnit with the questions, Elizabeth!_ Fuming, she gripped at the counter as she lowered her head, fighting back the tears that so desperately wanted to spring forth. _He can’t answer them._

_But...what if someone else could?_

She froze mid-breath, staring in stunned silence out the windows at the far end of the room. She didn’t _want_ to go back to Earth, that much she knew. Nothing awaited her there. What if she went somewhere _else_?

 _Why not tag along with the Engin–...Za’il?_ This, she realised, was a thought that had been scratching at the furthest vestiges of her mind from the moment she had seen him do something other than try to kill her. The idea of returning to Earth and having to explain what had happened, in a way that wouldn’t trigger a deluge of interest in this festering shitpile of a moon, and in a way that didn’t _completely_ discredit her and all the work her team had meticulously, obsessively procured over multiple years, left her stomach churning with distaste.

Besides, what did she owe? She had been laughed from one side of the planet to the other with her theories. Her one last connection to any semblance of family had gone up in flames days ago, severing once and for all any hope of a happy, quiet life in some cosy corner of the blue-and-green orb. Beyond admitting both defeat and utter confusion, what awaited her as the dust settled?

It all seemed _so damned small_ from so far away.

Expelling a battered breath, she mused the thought of taking the lifeboat in any direction other than _home_. She could probably stretch the supplies for three years with just herself aboard, but it would quickly dry up in barely one if her guest hung around. His ship would have been an ideal candidate for a replacement, had it not been rendered inoperable by her own hand; besides, he would likely want to salvage it for himself and have little else to do with a creature whose species he was previously hell-bent on destroying.

_Maybe we could talk about it._

Recalling the note she had begun to compose for later translation, she shuffled over to the piano and retrieved the scratchy mess; in the wake of this evening’s happenings, she realised just how trite it all seemed. This would be the _last_ thing he’d be interested in reading. _Time to start again._

Time lurched on as she curled up on the couch she’d long since claimed as her own with the tablet on one thigh and the pen and pad on the other; bouncing meaninglessly between the two, she had to admit her attention was shot to pieces. Hardly a thing had made it to the page, and the tip of her finger _hurt_ from incessantly and mindlessly scrolling up and down through the dictionary. This was about as unproductive a use of her time as she’d ever experienced; gritting her teeth, she batted the paper aside and exited the dictionary, crossing her legs as she forced herself to focus on something else instead.

By now the sky was stained in purple and red pastels, sunrise groping at the haze forming on what little of the horizon she could see past the truly immense landscape ringing the valley, igniting the snow-capped peaks and thrusting the cumuliform above them into vibrant light. The shower had been going for an inordinate length of time by now, surely something in the region of an hour; there had been little movement coming from the bathroom recently, and she pondered the validity of sauntering in there to politely check if her guest was still conscious.

Of course, the moment she clambered to her feet and stretched, the water _finally_ trickled to nothing. A final gargle from the drain heralded the soft, distant pad of wet feet. Good, he was still alive.

Realising just how long it had been since either of them had eaten, she soon found herself pondering their next meal; whatever it was, she would probably match whatever he consumed. She was _starving_. Though, it was probably not a good idea to gorge oneself before stepping outside onto a hostile world for an in-depth circuit of the vessel. There was an omnipresent nag in the back of her mind, never quite letting go of the fact that not _all_ the crew had died from blunt force trauma, fire or from being blasted to smithereens. She would need to keep her wits about her and be able to react accordingly.

The _hiss_ of the bedroom door sliding open stole her from her thoughts; twisting on her perch on the couch, the turned to see what state the poor Engineer was in, hoping to see an at least somewhat refreshed expression on his face, hoping she wasn’t going to be met with the lifeless, puffy gaze that had met her the moment he dropped his helmet and remained the entire evening as he struggled to contain his grief.

Frankly, it was anything but; her jaw dropped below wide eyes as he shot her a brief, sheepish look before padding toward the crates he’d dragged on board. That had answered at least one of the millions of unimportant questions about his species that had rattled about in her brain from the moment she’d laid eyes on him – naked apart from a rather damp towel tied around his waist, his body was every bit as statuesque as she’d imagined it might be, details etched in translucent porcelain, smatterings of shiny white scars webbed amongst forks of dark, purple veins hiding beneath the surface. Her face flushed a deep red as he crouched down beside one of the crates, rifling through it with one hand while the other remained firmly tucked into the towel affording him his last scraps of dignity. _Good girls don’t stare,_ she scolded herself as she averted her eyes and busied herself with the tablet, forcing her mind to focus on the comparatively banal task of familiarising herself with the lifeboat’s schematics.

He found what he was looking for with an irritated grunt, tugging it free in a clatter of solid matter against fabric before hurriedly marching back into the bedroom and sliding the door shut. To her credit, she had kept her eyes firmly fixed on the status report the system had burped up for the atmospheric thrusters, idly noting that several of them would require repairs before being of any use.

If she wasn’t completely awake before, she was now; that had been the _last_ thing she’d expected to see this morning, and it had left her with a hormone-fueled _thu-thud_ of a heartbeat pounding in her chest. The embarrassed glow remained on her cheeks as she pointedly stared at the outline of the ship taking up the tablet screen, trying to cobble together a plan of attack for her external recce run. The sun’s orange glow had begun to stream into the lifeboat at an exaggerated angle, illuminating the wall behind her and leaving her squinting; after breakfast, she would take advantage of the favourable weather that had finally arrived.

The Engineer finally emerged from the bedroom, properly dressed so she discovered after a hesitant glance. He lingered about the crates he’d left by the door, awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot as his gaze danced between them and the tiny Human at the other end of the vessel, before eventually making up his mind and walking back over to the couches and sinking down on the unoccupied side with a huff, his back in the sun. Casting him as much of a neutral smile as she could, aware the last thing he’d want was to be _patronised_ , she plucked the pad from beside her, flicked the dictionary back onto the tablet screen, and set about composing a message for him.

_What would you like to eat?_

Though he was vastly more alert than he had been even an hour ago, there was evidently still lag in the system; he stared long and hard at the scrawl, chewing on his bottom lip for a drawn-out moment, before grasping another pen and scribbling a response. He kept it pinched between his fingers a little while longer, seemingly second-guessing himself before slipping the pad back across the table toward her.

_Something salty._

She grinned as she pushed herself to her feet; she could most certainly handle a salty, hearty breakfast. Shuffling toward the bar, she tossed up her options: a proper hot breakfast with mushrooms, hash browns, sausages, poached eggs, all drowning in bacon; scrambled eggs over a thick slab of toast, also drowning in bacon; cutting straight to the chase and indulging in a pizza, drowning in both bacon and anchovies…

Her stomach gurgled, unimpressed by her indecision.

 _Big Breakfast it is,_ she grinned. Pulling the largest plate she could find out of the dishwasher and loading it into the food dispenser, she programmed it for a double serving with every extra she could think of, swiftly followed by two coffees and two glasses of orange juice. Unwilling to risk aggravating her wound by lifting too much at once, however healed it may be, she opted to carry the drinks to the table first, followed by the overflowing plate and another bottle of water; they would most certainly be needing refreshment after demolishing an excess of beans, potatoes, mushrooms, eggs, sausages, tomatoes and an obscene amount of the bacon she couldn’t help but endlessly fixate on.

The Engineer hadn’t noticed the arrival of food, evidently, despite the clatter of glass and cutlery. His gaze had remained outside, watching the sun slowly rise in golden tendrils over the barren landscape, toying with the wisps of dust beneath the mild breeze and painting the thin, sparse clouds with all manner of warmth. Reaching for her coffee and cradling the mug between two hands, Shaw found herself staring, too; her eyes trailed the huge, sun-soaked silhouette sitting opposite, squinting in the light as she drank in every detail afforded to her in the morning glare.

It had been a new biosuit he’d grabbed from the crate in a state of undress, she realised; the tear in the left sleeve was no more, and this one appeared half a shade darker. There were no burn marks from the foul, acidic fluids belched all over it days prior, the ribbing over his chest smoother, shinier than the previous one, fused seamlessly to his skin. After two thousand years, it must have been about time to swap it out – though the new one couldn’t really have actually been _new_.

It also became apparent, in the sun’s light, that he’d peeled off a significant portion of the goo from his head before exiting the bedroom. The majority of the left side of his face was now unmarred, fresh skin appearing smooth and shiny. Small patches remained along the worst of the burns, clearly still doing work; it left her wondering when she could do the same with her own damage, and whether she would truly be left with equally as undamaged flesh after all was said and done.

Stealing a moment to take a swig of her coffee, Shaw wondered just what was going through his head. What sort of world had left him behind as aeons spooled by? What was left of it beyond this wasteland? Who had missed him, mourned him? Did he have a family that had waited and waited, never knowing if he had perished during whatever the _hell_ had happened here – or had they assumed him dead from the start? Was there anything left for him now?

No longer focused on the _what_ , it was the _who_ that captivated her. Beyond a nameless, contextless alien – so easy to regard as a god or a higher being – here sat a person, a _man_ , whose future had been snatched from him. As much as his kind had clearly consented to being stored in stasis, apparently on a regular enough basis if they dressed equipped for it as he had, it was unlikely they thought about scenarios like this an awful lot when climbing in and succumbing to the machine. Or perhaps they did, hoping against hope the roll of the die paid off, that fortune favoured them this time, disregarding the unthinkable and doggedly focusing on the task at hand.

Perhaps he was thinking about this _right now_.

She could only imagine how easy it was to be swallowed whole by grief in this kind of cataclysm. She’d repeatedly toed that line in her own current situation, maintaining a tenuous grasp on her sanity with constant distractions, a litany of tasks to complete, and an endless fascination with the one other survivor of this whole ordeal.

 _Idle hands are the Devil’s workbench_ , she quietly mused as he continued to stare into the abyss. _You’ve benefitted from constant distractions. So will he._

Shaw cleared her throat. “Za’il, breakfast’s getting cold.”

His gaze snapped to her at the sound of his name, at first uncomprehending; watching with vague bemusement as she placed her coffee down and stabbed several mushrooms onto a fork, he eventually expelled a sigh and followed suit. _Good, at least he’s getting some nutrition into him._

Unsurprisingly, it seemed the shoe was on the other foot this morning. A far cry from his attack on the spaghetti she’d first presented – had it been days ago? – he seemed to be content hesitantly picking at it, favouring the hash browns and beans while Elizabeth set about destroying the bacon and eggs with the fervour of a starved wolf. Unashamedly scoffing, eating more than her fair share, she had cleared half the plate, sucked down her coffee, and drained her orange juice before he’d made much of a dent. Even as she ate her fill, disguising a contented belch as best she could behind both hands, he’d made little progress. It occurred to her that it was probable he simply didn’t like it. She’d seen him devour three quarters of the first meal they’d shared and make short work of the porridge the following day. Was it worth fetching either of those instead, just in case? It was worth trying, at any rate–

He had met her gaze, clearly sensing her concern. His features softened for a moment as he leaned down to jot a note on the pad for her before gingerly taking one last sip of coffee and slumping back against the couch with a long sigh as his eyes trailed back outside.

Translating seemed to be getting somewhat easier, though it still took a frustratingly long time to make sense of the smallest of phrases.

_It’s fine, I’m just not very hungry._

She nodded, exhaling softly as she regarded the cooling meal, then the immense body hunched on the edge of the couch. _Fair enough. I’d feel the same in your shoes, mate._

It looked as though it would actually be a great day for weather, by what she’d seen on this hellish rock so far; the wind was minimal and the sun had stayed out, casting aside its golden sheen as it rose higher in the sky. It would be relatively easy to spot anything amiss in these conditions, she considered; such was true of both mechanical failure and potential uninvited guests. After a few more minutes spent digesting, she would set about exploring the hull, she decided – note down any obvious failures, see how viable repairs were, and work it all out from there. After that she would shower and climb into bed, and reward herself with the first proper sleep she’d had in...God, how long had it been? _Too long_ , that was for sure. Before setting the wheels of escape in motion, she owed herself some good, solid, quality rest.

Za’il had clearly skipped straight to the latter, having rolled to the side and collapsed in an undignified heap on the couch. With his head propped against the folded duvet and his feet hanging awkwardly over the end, he seemed to have found a way to be at least somewhat comfortable in an environment built for people half his size. Strangely, he didn’t seem to mind the sun in his face, though at its present angle it was quite well filtered through the thick plexiglass. Blatantly staring once more as his own gaze fell upon the abyss beyond the roof, she finally noticed a detail she’d been missing all this time; his eyes weren’t black, they were _blue_. Even in direct sunlight his pupils were far larger than those of any Human, but they had contracted enough to show the deep blue of his irises, which were large enough that they filled the majority of each eye. As strange as it was, she felt almost like she knew him a little better for having observed that.

By the time she was sure her breakfast wasn’t going to repeat on her, the Engineer had long since given up on wakefulness and was snoring softly; she quietly hoped he wasn’t anything like herself, susceptible to vivid dreams that tangled reality with terror as her mind decompressed, analysing and defragmenting events both recent and historical. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to fill in the gaps – he certainly had plenty of fuel for nightmares. There was no envy of his position here.

Boots all but silent against the cold sheen of the deck, she stepped past the crates cluttering the airlock tunnel and activated the panel housing the vessel’s supply of pressure suits. For once grateful for Weyland’s indulgent ways, in this case engineered redundancy, she noted there were six suits behind the panel; there were likely more elsewhere, even if only half would fit her. Kicking off her boots, she dragged the nearest, smallest suit from its hanger and began wrestling it on.

A distant pang thumped at her abdomen as she recalled the last time she’d yanked the zipper on one of these suits; she had barely staggered out of the surgery unit, full of staples and agony, drenched in sweat and blood, and merely sealing the suit had just about resulted in her collapsing in a heap. How she’d remained on her feet was still somewhat of a mystery. It was relief upon relief that the twinge she felt this time was negligible, likely muscle memory at best. There was nothing pleasant about staggering around in such a state of half-dead disrepair.

Plopping the helmet on her shoulders and sealing it against her suit, she quietly paced back to the coffee table to retrieve the tablet beside the sleeping giant and pulled up the advanced schematics diagrams as she headed back toward the airlock. Half an hour was all she would sink into the first loop, she reasoned, knowing she could spend hours out there and leave overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead. Besides, the less she was exposed to the dangers likely still out there…

 _No weapons,_ her own voice from days ago echoed in the back of her skull. Oh, _that_ had gone well, hadn’t it? So much for an innocent archaeology-themed exploration – though, in hindsight, she had been blind to the fact that this was not Earth, and they could never have guaranteed there were no dangers awaiting them. It had been one of many critical mistakes, she realised; now that they were down to one singular survivor, it was time to stop making _so many damned mistakes_.

Gritting her teeth with overwhelming distaste, she freed one of the flamethrower units from its hanger and reluctantly slung its strap over her shoulder. She wouldn’t use it, she knew she wouldn’t use it, unless, unless…

 _Nothing will be out and about in such sunny weather,_ she reassured herself. _And if there is, I’ll just deliver a warning shot, fend it off._

A gentle, warm breeze greeted her gloved fingers as the airlock hissed open in front of her. The sun’s warmth toyed with the suit’s thick lining as it cast the valley beyond in white light, inviting as it was foreboding in its drama, an unsettling blend of the alien and the familiar. She realised it had been _days_ since she’d been outside; at the very least, it would be a refreshing change from the sterility of the lifeboat.

 _You’ve got a job to do, Doctor,_ her mind chided. _Get it over and done with, there’s a warm bed waiting for you after this._

Sucking in a breath, she stepped out of the airlock. Booted feet unsettled the dust-smattered landscape as they landed, the wind carrying the fine, brown powder away from the lifeboat and toward the looming wreck dominating the valley beyond.

_Here goes nothing._


	7. Lullaby

Not that things ever seemed to go to plan if she had anything to do with it, but this had been more of a blow than she was prepared for. 

Having paced the perimeter of the vessel until the shadows had shifted, swinging from one edge of the rocks scattered throughout the valley to their opposite side, each pass seemed to bring more bad news. Bent and scraped, the outer hull had sustained significant damage along its port side when it landed, trading paint with the crumbling rocks behind the vessel. It was nothing that she could repair, but it wasn’t breached. Perhaps it would still fly, though re-entry would be a gamble. It would have to do, but perhaps it simply couldn’t. 

Worse had been discovering the shattered remains of one of the FTL nacelles; it had simply coughed up errors when scanned from inside the vessel, listing a litany of failed sensors, broken conduits and potential breaches, but it hadn’t told her it was all because the engine had been _sheared off the hull_. Its twin, closer to the bow of the ship, had taken a beating in the crash, but as twisted as its casing was, it might yet fly. The errors it produced seemed far less serious – though, arguably, ‘engine is missing’ made everything else seem trivial.

Atmospheric thrusters hadn’t fared much better in the process, with two of them so badly twisted they’d caved in on themselves. Unfortunately, they were also positioned on the belly of the ship; there was no feasible way to reach them. 

The only good news she’d discovered in this dreary process was that the ferocious winds had dragged the hulking carcass the Engineer had dumped outside away, rolling it several hundred metres toward the base of the mountains and clear of anywhere they needed to be. She imagined it was now rotting in the sun. Pressure suits and atmospheric helmets certainly had their advantages – _that_ was a stench she could live without ever experiencing.

Thinking about the task at hand, she found herself wondering if it was possible to ease the ship up using a combination of all of the remaining engines, babying the damaged hull into orbit with the sort of skill and patience she simply didn’t possess, and setting course for...for…

 _Minor detail,_ she grumbled. _The closest known inhabited planet is Earth._

 _This is not looking good._  

Maybe her fantasies of exploring the galaxy were a little far-fetched. The lifeboat only did what it said on the label; it was designed to take its occupants to the nearest safe-harbour, which in this case, was back to Earth. It was no starship. Both of _those_ had been rendered inoperable in the crash, to varying degrees. Without a vessel with longer legs, entertaining the idea of travelling the galaxy was clearly folly. 

Dread had been nagging at the pit of her gut from the moment she set foot outside; she was very much staring down the barrel of last resort. The idea of sending an SOS to Earth and awaiting rescue in stasis was unconscionable for a variety of reasons, not least of which being her distaste with stasis in the first place. Worse was the Human propensity to stick fingers where they don’t belong; she knew any rescue party would be overwhelmed by the temptation of exploration, no matter what dire warnings she might send ahead of her. They might even start looking around the wreckage of the alien ship before finding her, or even do exactly as the Prometheus crew had, and enter the towers. With Human bodies to discover, their risk of sating curiosity and thus encountering the _things_ that had befallen the crew would increase by an order of magnitudes. 

A rescue party would be little more than a suicide mission. They may even meet their doom before reviving her from stasis. 

An involuntary shudder wracked her from head to toe. She would find herself quite literally in the same predicament as the last living Engineer – a fate, she realised in that moment, worse than death.

She was slowly realising that teamwork was her best bet if she intended to leave this place alive. 

Completing one final loop of the vessel, she set about adapting her game plan. She needed to find out more about where Za’il intended to go, what technology was left behind, and what skills he could bring to their escape efforts; between the two of them, they would be able to cobble together a solution. 

 _Realistically, he could probably cobble a solution together on his own,_ she scowled as she pulled herself up onto the platform outside the airlock. _He doesn’t actually need a Human underfoot._ You _are the one that needs_ him _._

The airlock hissed open on command. She set about lifting her helmet the moment it slid shut behind her. _If he doesn’t need me, then why’s he still hanging around? He’s come and gone of his own free will several times now._

Soft snores echoed about the silent, still atmosphere within the lifeboat; sure enough, the immense body of a sleeping Engineer was still sprawled over the couch right where she’d left him. This was good news; she hadn’t disturbed him with her crashing and banging, and he hadn’t slipped out unnoticed and disappeared. 

A yawn erupted from her unsolicited, damn-near dislocating her jaw in the process. Half an hour had blown past in the blink of an eye, and she knew that hours had passed as she circled the bent and battered ship; like she’d predicted, she had gotten lost in the details and allowed what she found to overwhelm her. More than anything, she knew it was time to ‘sleep on it’, as it were – she was in no state to be of any use right now, let alone making any decisions. Yawning again as she placed the tablet down on top of the piano with one hand and tugging at the suit zipper with the other, she found herself staggering toward the bathroom to cash in on that shower she’d promised herself earlier. 

The Engineer’s old suit had been discarded in the far corner of the room, she sleepily noted as she began to shed her own. It had been neatly folded, regardless of its state, placed below the towel she’d handed him, hanging high on the wall out of her reach. Tossing her suit and clothing aside in a messy heap beside the far larger apparel, it struck her as a remarkably _orderly_ thing to have done; her sleepy mind reflected on the similarly-folded duvet he was now passed out on top of and the brief spurt of cleaning and sorting he had engaged in while they were both still wounded, idly wondering if it was a cultural thing or whether he was just _irritatingly tidy_. 

Stepping into the warm drizzle pouring from the ceiling was akin to stepping into pure relief, and for a moment she found herself unashamedly standing stock-still, face-up as countless heavy drops gently pummelled every inch of her exhausted body. Eyes squeezed shut, it was surprisingly easy to cast her mind from this deadly moon to places far friendlier, places of fleeting happiness conjured up from her tumultuous past; in a breath she was standing beneath the rainy gush of the outdoor shower she’d fallen in love with in Bali, listening to the soft bubble of tropical waves lapping at the powdery, pale beach mere metres from their oceanside cabin as the evening breeze delicately tugged at the many palm fronds lining the waterfront and ringing the resort.

Charlie had pulled up a deck chair one starry evening, sipping from a tall glass from his perch in the garden as he watched her shower. It had been particularly warm that evening, and she hadn’t been shy about hogging the faucet to stave off the heat. Heck, she hadn’t been shy _at all_ ; that evening, as she recalled, she had been strikingly free of the constant, lingering shame that trailed her in her shadow, whispering about her small breasts, her thick, muscular torso, her unusual cheekbones, chiding her for being _so different_ from the tall, leggy, _beautiful_ women she was so often surrounded by, interjecting with _good girls don’t_ every time she felt a stirring in her belly, burning beneath her husband’s gaze. That night, she had been _free._  

Perhaps it was the wistful gaze of the man that evening, admiring every single moonlit detail as she teased the knots and sea salt from her hair. He had so patiently admired her, raising his glass to her every time she bashfully turned to see if he was still there, grinning gleefully until he could no longer take it. She recalled with a flushed smile as he’d plopped his drink aside, stripped his clothes off, and wrapped his arms around her. Her skin tingled from head to toe beneath his embrace as she tugged him beneath the stream, arching upward to bury her face in his neck…

...and now he was dead. 

 _Goddamnit, Elizabeth,_ she silently raged, breath hitching in her throat. _Thinking about him isn’t going to bring him back, is it?_

It was the silence, the utter silence, that drove home the sheer _abandonment_ of being the sole survivor of the Prometheus disaster. Nothing could _ever_ cleanse from her mind the memories of watching her husband burned alive, taking his last breaths as she struggled against the grasp of several crew members holding her back, damn near pushed to the brink of insanity in her desperation to save him in any manner she could. She couldn’t even confide in anyone about it – and she wouldn’t be able to for years. Her destiny, apparently, was to be left to marinate in her own grief, ambushed in staccato stabs as time plodded on, never truly healing. 

She swallowed the sob that threatened to break loose. _For now, Doctor, you need to focus on un-marooning yourself, and stop dwelling on the past._  

What she needed, clearly, was that damn sleep she’d been looking forward to for hours. A tired, stressed mind was of little use – especially one apparently hell-bent on self-destruction. 

Wringing her hair out as the rain slowed to a trickle, she set about quietly drying herself off as she dug through the archives of her mind for memories untainted by sadness, loss, humiliation or shame; if she could have just one memory, _just one memory_ to cling to as she drifted to sleep, she reasoned she might be allowed a relatively peaceful eight hours where she might regain lost ground in the recovery game. 

Idly, her fingers tugged at the edge of the skin-like film hanging from her wounded belly as she stared at her haunted reflection in the mirror; dark rings hung below her eyes, matching drawn lips and a damn-near soulless squint. _One singular benefit of being totally alone,_ she mused blackly, _is that there’s no one here to see you looking like total arse._ Heaving a sigh, she thumbed at the edge a little long–…

... _skin-like film?_

Flinching, she reflexively shot a look downward; the thick glue that had sealed her shut for the last few days appeared to have thinned to a white sheet not unlike a masque, edges having peeled back and frayed as they hung free of her. Her stomach churned as she experimentally pinched one edge and tugged at it, ears ringing at the mere suggestion of intentionally hurting herself. Should she be doing this, or should she be asking the Engineer if it was safe to do so? Should she really be trusted with such a task considering how injured she was, is this–…

...the entire patch slid off in her grasp, revealing perfectly undamaged skin below, apart from the faintest of scars embossed in white where the incision had once been. 

Stunned, she gently pawed at her belly with one hand as she discarded the film with the other. It was as if she’d not carved herself up days earlier, as if she’d never given birth to the vile monstrosity festering elsewhere in the canyon. The thought of it all left her retching violently and scrambling to swallow the immediate aftermath.

Her arms ached as she gripped her biceps with opposing hands, suddenly aware of just how cool the lifeboat’s atmosphere remained; squinting at her reflection in the mirror, she noted the deep, dark shadows beneath her fingers, at odds with the room’s diffuse lighting. Lifting one hand, the cold chill of understanding ran down her spine – purple-and-yellow imprints of four huge finger-marks stained her upper arm, with matching bruises on the other side. The Engineer’s handling of her had been rough, but she hadn’t assumed it to be _that_ rough; swallowing as gooseflesh rippled about her, she decided to take it as yet another sage warning that she was not the one wielding the power here.  

After downing a glass of water and hastily brushing her teeth, she set about hunting for more clothes before climbing into bed; upturning the underwear drawers yielded no noteworthy results other than the realisation that she would be traipsing about in a size-too-small for a while yet. She resigned herself to that reality with a frustrated huff, tugging fresh items on with a few strained grunts, before tugging back the sheets of the enormous bed and clambering in, nuzzling her face into the soft down pillow that greeted her and bunching the thin blankets that remained around her. 

She barely had a chance to call upon an untarnished memory before she was fast asleep.

* * *

Dreams were a funny thing. Sometimes they were a wild, unrealistic reimagining of recent events, twisted into something familiar and unique and given fresh context when run through entirely different scenarios with entirely different variables. Sometimes they were simply memories, resurrected in a rose-tinted glow, all nostalgia and warmth tickling the senses. Sometimes they were the exact opposite; twisted, horrifying phantasms that preyed upon every weakness, every regret, every fear and twisted the knife through the floor until one woke up screaming and sobbing. 

And sometimes, they were a cryptic reimagining of seemingly unimportant happenings, a smattering of feelings drawn together into a scene that had never happened, but ought to have. 

Elizabeth had been drawn into one of the latter, engaged in a snowglobe world as she sat behind an old, rickety piano whose stained ivory keys had been adored by many hundreds of hands before her own. Its sweet, warm notes were hesitant beneath her fingertips, intimidated by the sheer amount of sound that erupted from them as she stroked key after key under the watchful gaze of…

It was her father sitting beside her, she realised. Calm patience radiated from him as she plucked notes at random, his gaze full of the sort of love and safety she hadn’t felt in years. How had she only just noticed him? 

Her tiny fingers couldn’t quite reach an octave, as hard as she tried. Regardless, she played on; random stabbings gradually gained cohesion, slowly evolving from haphazardly-plucked notes to broken bursts of hesitant melody, playing songs she had never heard with fingers she barely recognised. _One-two-three, one-two-three,_ music flowed as it burgeoned with confidence, all as her father watched in silence, his reassuring smile enduring and kind. 

It occurred to her that she was watching all of this from the third-person, not from within her own skin as she had initially assumed; the small, cherubic child, no older than six, was without question her, the man sitting beside her undeniably her father, but here she stood, watching them as her child-self delicately plucked at the weathered keys before her. Her hair had been _so curly_ as a child, she remarked; she’d hated it at the time, but she would _kill_ for those ringlets now. She would _kill_ to be sitting alongside her father, too, but it wasn’t exactly an option. 

It also occurred to her, after a breath, that she was grasping the neck of a violin with one hand, and its bow with the other. _When had she picked the confounded thing up?_  

None of this made any sense; she had never sat with her father by a piano in this manner, and certainly not at that age. She had never heard any of the songs her child-self was playing, let alone played them herself, and yet there she was, watching the scene unfold. 

She felt compelled to join them. 

Hefting the violin to her shoulder, she raised the bow and played. The songs she had never heard flowed from her fingers as if she knew them by heart, following her child-self’s lead and matching the flourishing passion that flooded the snowglobe world, breath hitching in her throat as the melody became her. It had been so many years since she had played, and yet she played as if it had just been yesterday. Where had all this come from? 

In the next moment, she wasn’t quite so sure it was her child-self playing the piano after all. Whatever was being played had evolved beyond the skillset of a mere child despite the occasional fumble that seemed to only add to its spirit. Fingers stretched too far to be those of a little girl; perhaps it was her father playing all along. She couldn’t be sure – the whole scene had become somewhat unclear, with only her own hands properly visible before her, the rest a haze of heart and melody. Whoever it was, they seemed to pluck from song to song, not entirely sure of themselves or the instrument, but played with warmth regardless. In her dream state, it was easy to play along despite the odd pauses and morphing from melody to melody on a whim; the music had become her, she could feel it in her belly. 

Such was its warmth that she felt completely swaddled, balled up in a world of cosy bliss, gripping at the pillows and blankets in a sleepy stupor. As the world around her faded to sepia-tinged bokeh, she slowly, grindingly came to the realisation that she was lying down in a tangle of sheets, her arms locked around a thick, plush pillow cradled against the length of her body. An enormous yawn overcame her as she clawed the hair from her eyes and stretched, sliding her legs free of the bedding bunched around her ankles and rolling onto her back as she grappled with consciousness. 

 _What a bizarre dream_. She couldn’t argue with its pleasantness in light of recent happenings, though. Being lost in a world of music and childhood nostalgia was refreshing beyond belief compared to the myriad of other possibilities, and she had to admit, she felt genuinely rested. God knows what had prompted any of it, but she found herself more than pleased it had happened. Even with the clarity of wakefulness she didn’t recognise any of the melodies that still rang through her head, and having never been particularly creative with music in her own right, she was left somewhat perplexed as to what it all meant. 

She paused in thought, listening as the music continued to flow through her mind, unbidden. What games was her overtaxed head up to this time? 

Sitting up as she pawed at her eyes with both palms, it occurred to her that perhaps the distant tinkle of fingers over keys was not a figment of her imagination; it sounded _real, too real,_ to simply be a mere earworm. She clambered to her feet with a thoughtful frown, as confused as she was curious. 

Having found fresh clothes that seemed to fit – supposedly loose jeans, and another turtleneck – she ran her hands through her hair in an effort to bring some semblance of sanity to the red mop on her head and sauntered out of the bedroom. 

As much as her mind had picked over the options – had Za’il found a way to activate the entertainment system, was there a hidden speaker somewhere playing music, was the piano the kind that came pre-programmed with its own music? – she hadn’t prepared herself for the sight of the Engineer’s enormous frame perched precariously on the far-too-small stool in front of the piano, eyes firmly closed as he plucked away at a strikingly complex, austere melody from hard-wired memory. The music from her dream... _it hadn’t been a dream at all_. 

She stared in open-mouthed fascination as he played on, oblivious to her presence; again she pondered just how little she had expected to be greeted by the sight, having not the slightest clue what to do with this newfound information. 

Padding past him with all the silence she could muster, she cast her eyes about the room for any clues as to how this moment had come to be; night had since fallen, which meant that she’d been asleep for at least eight hours. He could have easily been awake for half of that. 

The magazines she’d scattered across the table were no longer spread in an unkempt manner, having since been neatly stacked in two piles to one corner with the well-used pad of paper sitting by the other below a handful of pens. Their breakfast had since been demolished, with the cutlery piled in the middle of the empty plate and multiple mugs and glasses sitting tidily alongside it; elsewhere, it appeared _some_ progress had been made in stacking books back on the shelves, though apparently he’d been distracted early in the process, because there were many more scattered back onto the floor, open, arranged in several stacked arcs radiating from where he must have been sitting. 

She cast him a quick glance as he played on, quietly shuffling closer to the carefully arranged material strewn across the floor. It didn’t take her long to figure out what he’d spent his time doing while she was asleep; books and magazines of all shapes and sizes lay open on pages colourfully depicting every facet of Human culture imaginable, from the classic masterpieces hanging in museums around the globe to bright abstracts, from full-sized formal orchestras to flamboyantly-dressed rock stars, wedding cakes, vintage cars, fashion models strutting the catwalk, vibrantly-painted faces of indigenous tribes from far-flung communities, propaganda art from the multitude of post-industrial wars, close-ups of the artwork on the fuselage of historical aircraft. It seemed as though he’d sought to absorb any aspect of Earth’s finer points, with special attention reserved for the innermost ring of books. Every single one of those depicted musical instruments of all descriptions, from guitars to oboes, church organs to trumpets, drumkits to cellos. 

And on he played. 

Grinning with more pride than she intended, Shaw folded both arms against the lid of the baby grand and leaned in, watching with intrigue now that she had context. Finally noticing she was awake, his eyes shot open with a start, fingers freezing against the keys. Her grin broadened as she offered him a nod, urging him on; after a breath his expression softened from its startled fluster to one of bashful acknowledgement, and after stealing a quick glance back down at his hands, he began something new. 

Shaw would have expected to be more uncomfortable than she was, locked in his dark gaze, but there was something there she was struggling to put her finger on. Gone was the lost, soulless, _haunted_ look that had dominated his features the night before, having been replaced with something that much more...wise? He was certainly more lively, almost relieved, soothed, with an intensity about him that she didn’t recognise. Stealing a glance over his shoulder toward the scattered books ringing the floor, a thousand new questions flooded her mind as to what this _bloody enigma_ was up to, and what the significance of all this was to him. There was so, so much more to _any_ of this than she could begin to comprehend, and it left her failing to puzzle together how she’d gone from hiding from a murderous alien to marvelling at how he had simply sat down and begun to play an instrument that was, for all intents and purposes, alien to _him_.

When she looked back up at him, she was met with the tiniest of quirks of the lips, the faintest of smiles; those dark eyes, it wasn’t _relief_ in them, it was _understanding_. All but black in the dim lighting, they seemed to gaze straight through her skin and into her soul, brimming with newfound knowledge and a gentleness that seemed uncharacteristic in light of their interactions so far. 

He murmured something in his own language, his deep voice almost Human in its softness, the alien tone she found so disquieting hanging in mere wisps about a handful of the vowels. If she had a superpower, she mused, it would most definitely have to be that of an omniglot, able to understand any spoken word. Oh, how she wished she could understand the things he said. 

And just like that, he was done. Trailing off as his eyes found the keys again, he sucked in his bottom lip as his expression grew pensive; hesitating for a breath, he momentarily caught her gaze before pushing himself to his feet, stepping aside, and sauntering back toward the couches.

She had barely begun scrambling for something to say, anything, before she realised he was reaching for the pad, brushing aside all of the pens bar one. Idly flicking at the plastic button end with his thumb, he paused to admire the rings of books between them, lingering about the piano for a moment, then sighed softly as he scrawled a note across the page and held it out to her. 

Plucking the tablet from the piano, she padded across the floor and took the note from him, sinking down onto the couch with a soft huff. Quickly setting about decoding the message, she barely noticed the Engineer drop the pen against the table and head for the crates he’d left by the airlock; words were by now becoming somewhat familiar, needing only to be double-checked rather than frantically searched for. She realised early on in her translation that he was most likely not repeating what he’d said earlier, as much as that disappointed her, but she had little doubt the message was of some significance given what had unfolded in the last few minutes. 

Over by the airlock, it was apparently business as usual; his stern demeanour had returned as he occupied himself rifling through the larger of the two crates, sorting and re-stacking items with the strong, almost _military_ poise that had become so familiar in the past few days. 

As she deciphered the last few words, it all became rather obvious – the grief, the research, the piano, and now the endless rustling at the far end of the vessel. 

_Enough moping. Let’s find a way off this godforsaken rock._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Machine-gun updating: I'm riding an unusual situation whereby weekdays are coming up free, weekends are full of work, and I'm stuck doing nothing in front of a 27" iMac and a very nice keyboard indeed. Needless to say I've written 10,000 words in the last two days. Please don't expect this sort of pace all the time, I'm just making the most of it while it lasts!
> 
> The voice: Much of my choice to write this story in the first place is exercise. Re-teaching myself how to build and then FINISH a story, moderating pace, selecting and constructing language in a multi-faceted way that becomes an experience rather than just words...and trying to write from a female character's perspective. The latter I struggle with immensely, but Shaw is proving somewhat easier than most. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and it makes it far easier to place myself in her shoes. It's going to be far, far easier for me to write from the Engineer's perspective in the next story but I am actually enjoying this for once.
> 
> This chapter: It's a strange one. Think of it as somewhat of an intermission, given how little happens in it aside from Elizabeth staggering around, trying but failing to be useful. It does play a poignant part in the way I'm setting up future stories, though; thinking about how the Engineers used a flute of sorts to activate various things on their...I want to say Bridge because I'm a hopeless Trekker. Add in the deleted scene where the Engineer is distracted by the video of a little girl playing a violin, and fluffs around with a book...we end up with this scene, where Za'il has an epiphany about the nature of Humans and distracts himself with research instead of sucking his thumb.


	8. Tapestry

Having spent what felt like an age turning the vessel upside-down, at first shuffling from location to location to carefully sift through the clutter but gradually surrendering to impatience and doing her best impression of a stomping, grunting Human jackhammer as she shoved aside piles of mystery components and upturned drawers, Elizabeth finally happened upon what she was looking for completely by accident. The Engineer had settled back on the couch with an armful of equipment and calmly watched as she raced about the lifeboat in an increasingly frantic manner and, much to her chagrin, had stifled a snort of laughter against a closed fist as she’d tripped on the edge of the coffee table as she’d rushed through and vaulted forward with melodramatic flair, wrenching it open on the edge of her calf and leaving a gouge in the flesh that remained intent on bleeding for at least a few minutes thereafter.

While she noted he had fascinated over the injury, apparently as curious as he was vaguely horrified by it, she had spotted a silvery glint amongst the miscellaneous _crap_ that had spewed from the drawer amid the chaos; pressing a dish towel against the gouge with one hand, she plucked the palm-sized metallic device from the floor with the other, cursing at it emphatically before tossing it onto the table with a loud enough clatter that it had startled her guest from his intent gaze.

Casting the bloodied rag further down the table, she turned her attention back to the hard-won device sitting between the two of them; fingertips brushing over its bevelled surface as she hunted for the controls, she reached for the tablet with her free hand and brought up the lifeboat schematics she’d been grappling with earlier.

Za’il had apparently happened upon a similar thought, and had set about fumbling with a somewhat smaller device of distinctly non-Human origin as he stood and paced toward the glass windows nearby. He paused intermittently to cast her a brief glance or two as he worked, holding the device in the general direction of the crashed Engineer vessel looming in the shadow of the mountains; she barely noticed, focused on her own task of forcing her own technology to sync despite its best attempts to refuse.

Brute force and ignorance once again proved to be the day’s victor, with the tablet yielding to her commands and the panel beneath her hand finally lighting up with an affirmative green. Breathing a triumphant huff, she set about calibrating the device as the Engineer paced past her and back over to the storage crates, gently dropping his own technology on the table along the way. When he sat back down she was still working on unearthing the contraption secrets, resisting the urge to resort to percussive methods as the display burped up errors in red.

The Engineer had commandeered the pad as she worked, watching her troubleshoot with as much calm as she could muster before pressing the nearest pen against its surface, by now quite heavily embossed through multiple pages and somewhat warped from being grabbed, dropped, leaned against, slid across surfaces, fiddled with and flipped through. He scribbled a quick note and slid it across the table with a deliberate, restrained grace that was beginning to grow familiar. It had since become reflex to swap the tablet back to the Sumerian dictionary perpetually running in the background, and she set about decoding his message with speed that both surprised and impressed her. A painful process, gradually becoming less so.

_Your blood is a strange colour._

She couldn’t help but chuckle below her breath. All this time she had been so intrigued by him, oscillating between fear and awe with dizzying frequency, so intensely aware that she was now the only living Human in recent history to have encountered a non-terrestrial person, that she’d almost completely forgotten that he, too, was in the presence of an alien creature of a species he’d likely never encountered before.

It struck her that he’d paid very little interest in her up until this point; sure, he had offered what passed as medical care while she was still in pieces and had made sure she was warm while she was sprawled across the couch, wounded, but apart from dragging her across the room as he prohibited her from following him, his interest had been chiefly on his own ship and, later, the reading material and art around the lifeboat. He had barely acknowledged her presence unless he was required to.

She had to admit, the attention left her feeling a little bare. Would he judge her entire race by this one example oozing red before him?

_Of course he will. I’m doing the same of him._

Perhaps it was worth capitalising on this sudden interest. Flipping through the translations again, she penned a response.

_And yours?_

He observed her for a breath after reading her response, then reached for one of the items he’d brought to the table with one hand, picking it up and twisting the base until a broad, black, somewhat teardrop-shaped structure popped free. After a brief bout of staring she finally recognised the object, the shape and size of it recognisably a jar just like the one that had contained the fire-and-ice goo that’d sealed her caesarean scar like glue. Whether or not it was the same thing was beyond her, but at least she could guess what it was. Still watching her, he ran the tip of the black blade against the tip of his middle finger for just a few millimetres; the edge split his translucent skin in a thin, clean line, and the resulting incision needed little encouragement to bleed.

The bead that rose to the surface of his marblesque skin was obsidian black, or so damn near it she couldn’t tell either way. He let it drip onto the dishrag below, the viscous droplets that fell quickly absorbing into the fabric alongside the deep red mess she’d left behind. At their outer edges, the Engineer’s blood drops faded to a deep indigo – if not for the harsh lighting above, she would have still assumed it to be black, starkly contrasting the vibrant crimson soaking the towel in heavy smears.

No wonder he’d felt the need to comment.

“That’s quite something,” she breathed as he twisted the top half of the jar, holding the incision at the tip of his finger away from the contents as the lid popped free; she was not at all surprised to see iridescent white goo bubbling within the thick, grey walls of the vessel, and watched with intrigue as the substance gradually stilled after he placed it on the table.

After smearing a quick dab against the cut he’d inflicted upon himself for mere demonstration, he murmured something in his own tongue and motioned with the other hand with a ‘come here’ gesture as he scrutinised the mess she’d made of her leg. When she offered little response, attention torn between the mending wound on his finger and the device demanding input an arm’s reach away, he said something else unintelligible with a little more firmness and pointed at the gouge on her leg with an index finger, then repeated the first gesture.

_Ah. That should have been obvious,_ she mused as she rotated on the couch raised her leg onto the table; at this rate she was certain they would be leaving a dent in the supply of whatever-the-stuff-was, but if he wasn’t shy about chewing through it, she reasoned there was little need to worry.

The sensation of an enormous hand grasping her ankle sent a jolt of electricity through her body, ricocheting from her head to her toes and demanding just about all of her self-control not to flinch. Once again she found herself marvelling at the scale of the creature – his fingers had no trouble in completely encircling her limb, holding her in place effortlessly while his free hand retrieved the sharp implement that had fallen from the bottom of the jar.

As strange as it was, and despite knowing better from the brief, sporadic encounters of touch she had experienced thus far, her mind had long since decided that the Engineer’s appearance, sharing more than just a passing resemblance to the myriad of stone statues marking Earth’s many cultures’ passage through time, meant that he must also feel like marble – cold, smooth, and hard. The hand grasping her ankle was anything but, with an alarmingly familiar soft warmth about the digits gently holding her still. Idly, her mind plucked at the theories that had brought her here in the first place; despite him clearly being from nowhere near Earth, there were enough striking similarities between the giant and her own hairy, fleshy species that it simply _made sense_ that they were somehow related. As cagey as he seemed about interacting with her, what little he’d shown her only further convinced her that somewhere, somehow, they were distantly of the same flesh and blood.

Oblivious to the cogs turning in her mind, Za’il set about dipping the blunt end of the implement into the jar of goo then set about running a thin strip of the substance over the length of the gouge along her calf. She supposed it wasn’t necessarily normal practise for one to dip their fingers into medical supplies and smear it around, though with a broken arm and a torn belly between them, she supposed there was little either of them could have done differently when they first addressed their injuries several days prior.

Having released his grasp on her ankle, the Engineer set about cleaning the instrument up with an unmarked section of the dish towel; the chill of the substance going about its work had already begun, and having placed her foot back on the deck, Shaw sucked in a breath and surrendered to the impending, inevitable sensation overload awaiting her.

Murmuring a few words in a slow, deliberate manner, Za’il caught her gaze as he mimed a bracing motion, demonstratively gripping at the edge of the coffee table for a drawn moment before resuming his tidying. The searing pain of her last experience with the stuff would remain forever etched into her mind, and it took little imagination to interpret his message. Grasping the cool surface with both hands, she squeezed her eyes shut and impatiently waited for the icy sting to explode into fire.

It did not disappoint; within a breath the searing cold gripping the gouge had burst into veritable flames, the muscles in her leg quaking uncontrollably as the overwhelming sensation of someone pressing her calf against molten steel gripped every inch of her psyche. Though it elicited an agonised cry from her throat, though she clung to the table as if it were a life raft, a tiny, calm voice in the back of her head observed that the pain simply wasn’t as tremendous as the first time, likely owing to the vastly more superficial wound and the meagre slick of the stuff at play compared to half the damn jar spewed throughout her innards. It did little to distract from the searing heat, however.

“Goddamn,” she cursed despite herself, immediately swallowing the pangs of guilt for her blasphemy, “God, it hurts…”

Having reassembled the jar, complete with its applicator device, the Engineer cast her what looked, through a mist of tears, like a brief sympathetic glance, then busied himself with other pieces of equipment. She barely registered it as the fire clinging to her flesh gradually dulled, filling the spaces in her mind that finally revealed themselves beyond the haze of agony with the task at hand. Once she was done being a mess, it was time to do exactly as Za’il had suggested earlier and begin planning a way off this foetid world.

Muscles throughout her leg took turns cramping painfully as their uncontrollable shaking reached critical mass, intermittently locking up her thigh and calf with stabbing sensations that rivalled the fierce flames against her skin. What remained of the intellectual portion of her mind, arguably as overwhelmed as the rest of her, found itself pondering the processes that were going on with the healing substance that caused so much goddamn pain; was it forcing damaged flesh back into place, or was it stimulating the body to do it all on its own? Was it leveraging her existing biology, or was it re-writing it? Though she would likely never find out, she yearned to unlock its secrets – if only for the satisfaction of having at least _some_ answers.

As it had before, without warning, the burn morphed into a significant tugging sensation, albeit significantly milder than it had been the first time. _Less to tug on,_ she reasoned, finally releasing her breath and her grasp on the table to look down at her spasming, cramping calf. Indeed; the substance had dried to a thin film this time, rather than a thick, translucent band of glue-like goo. Stealing a moment to mop the confounded tears from her vision with the back of a hand, Shaw raised her leg back onto the table with the aid of her other arm and coughed softly to get the Engineer’s attention.

Pausing in his work, he took a quick look at the white, flaking film and, with practised nonchalance, tugged it free by its lower edge. Aside from the remaining smears of blood in the area, it was of course though she had never ripped herself open in a fit of clumsiness; only the faintest of white, shiny scars remained, still cool and tingling from the onslaught. With little more than a subtle nod of approval, the Engineer simply went back about his business.

Time for her to do the same.

The clumsiness had extended to her troubleshooting, she realised with bashful disdain; if the tablet wasn’t searching for the device, then it was unlikely to find it. Rolling her eyes as she lamented her sloppy handiwork, she set about rectifying the problem with deft, impatient hands and sat back as the device in the middle of the table finally flickered to life.

With a faint electronic _beep_ , a projected, glowing image of the lifeboat flickered into existence above the table; the crisp, white blueprint sat almost a metre from bow to stern and half a metre high, its crystalline wireframe faintly illuminating the immediate area.

The Engineer jerked backward with its sudden appearance, dark eyes wide for a drawn moment before relaxing with amused understanding. There was the faintest echo of laughter about his voice as he muttered something under his breath, shaking his head as he pressed the tips of two fingers against a panel of one of his own devices he’d placed not far from the projector.

Elizabeth’s reaction was no different from his as a similarly white shape exploded into pearls of light, its wispy holographic edges emanating from the black, circular device further along the table. Reflexively recoiling back against the couch with an undignified yelp, she stared in wide-eyed awe at the horseshoe-shaped ship that had materialised alongside the projection of her own. He really _had_ stumbled upon the same idea, hadn’t he?

Unsurprisingly, her somewhat panicked scuffle across the furniture had elicited another huff of laughter from the immense alien. Shaking his head again, his attention drifted between the two projections, dark eyes drinking in the stark differences between the utilitarian lines of the lifeboat, and the intense, elaborate detail of the Engineer ship. Colour was all the two images had in common.

“Good thinking,” she mumbled as she willed her heart to still with a grin. Right hand once again fumbling with the projector controls, she reached up with her left to trace her fingers across the lifeboat wireframe in a sweeping wave, rotating it about its central axis so the bow pointed toward her. “Let’s see how bad this really is.”

A press of a button added a flourish of colour to the hologram, with damage showing as a gamut of yellows, oranges and reds; the port side of the ship was peppered with smatterings of red, much of it focused on the largely missing FTL nacelle and the abused thrusters along its belly. Other sections of the hull remained unmarred and glowing white, particularly the uppermost regions and much of the starboard side. The damaged nacelle, she realised, had been rendered by the hologram in its present state, rather than simply highlighted as requiring attention as it had when the data had been displayed on the tablet before her most intense scans. As nice a touch as that was, it wasn’t confidence-inspiring.

Having apparently drawn enough information from briefly observing her fiddling and swiping, Za’il reached one large hand toward the lifeboat hologram and cautiously swiped in the same manner, twisting the vessel about to examine the torn nacelle more closely. Leaning closer with an intent scowl, he seemed to scrutinise every little detail for quite some time, rocking the ship back and forth intermittently as one thing after another caught his eye; scowl deepening, he murmured something in his own tongue whilst casting Shaw a grim, thin-lipped glance, punctuating his words with a heavy sigh.

Seemingly uninterested in dwelling on the crumpled red mess for long, he spun the vessel around to examine the entrance by the stern; though he had passed through it several times by this point, seeing it in miniature must have given him context he lacked before. Asking what sounded like a question, though she hadn’t a hope of understanding it, he rotated the ship around so the main airlock faced her, and traced a pointed index finger around the outline of the lifeboat’s docking port.

At a wild guess, she assumed he’d recognised it as belonging to part of a larger ship. Couldn’t hurt to provide him with that information, could it?

After a brief argument with the tablet, she fed the projector the schematics for the rest of the ship and sat back and watched as the lifeboat quickly shrank to less than a tenth of its size, its outer reaches replaced by the far more robust, mitred outlines of the Prometheus.

Wide-eyed realisation flooded the Engineer’s expression as he openly gawped at the ship; after an extended moment his gaze darted to the bay windows beside them, tracing the landscape beyond in the wake of his own crashed ship, trailing the debris field scattered for miles between the lifeboat and the towers and well beyond. Little was left recognisable, such was the totality of the Prometheus’ destruction, but the tell-tale circular hoop of the rear of an FTL engine had fallen within view of the window. His eyes lingered for an age, picking apart the charred and twisted metal sprawled before them as if he’d finally noticed its existence in the first place. Perhaps, in fact, he had.

Swallowing hard, he finally returned his attention to the projection of the larger vessel; an index finger traced the tail end of one of the Prometheus’ FTL nacelles, quickly locating the wreckage _in situ_ , its remains outside glowing a faint purple beneath the gas giant’s glow in the pre-dawn haze. He openly drank in the ship’s scale, flitting between the lifeboat tucked safely away and the rest of the vessel dwarfing it, twisting the hologram to and fro with obvious apprehension as much as awe, wide eyes struggling with vastly more than what was merely presented before him.

He drew a breath and reached for the pad, fumbling with a pen whose nib refused to stay in place the moment he pressed it to paper. Another found favour after several tries; he scribbled a note, then flipped the pad around for her to read.

She had already flicked the dictionary open, grabbing a pen herself as she immediately set about decoding the message.

_How many were on board?_

As far as she could recall, it had been seventeen; most she had interacted with very little, despite supposedly leading the expedition. In reality, she realised, it had been a veritable tug-o’-war between Charlie and David, with the man and the android alike vying for progress in their chosen direction, seeking means to their own ends. She had spent so much of their away missions staggering along behind them, questioning their decisions and watching on, aghast, as both had respectively _lost their goddamn minds_ and done things that, in hindsight, had led directly to all manner of disastrous misadventures. Perhaps if the crew had spent more time actually listening to her, they would have been alive to…

Seventeen. Sixteen of whom were dead. She began to pen a response…

_No_ , it had been _eighteen_ , hadn’t it? Weyland’s appearance out of nowhere had come at a surprise, just when she’d thought she had reached the limit of how much surprise she could cope with.

She scratched out her response and corrected it.

_Eighteen._

Pursing his lips, he offered a solemn nod. No words were needed; the understanding that she was the sole survivor was mutual. No one had returned for her, and no one could have survived the impact that had lain to waste the mighty ship hanging before them in beams of white. He cast the Prometheus one last lingering stare, seemingly writing the Human technology off as a dead end just as she did the same, instead turning his attention toward the projection of his own vessel.

With a soft sigh, he shifted on his seat and reached forward to tap at a series of buttons on his own projector; just as had been done to the lifeboat, the immense juggernaut ignited with colour about the surfaces that had come crashing back into the planet’s surface, only displaying a haze of cyan and blue in place of the glaring reds saturating the smaller vessel. The entire forward section of the horseshoe ship glowed in scattered blue, deepest and darkest where it now lay against the rocks outside and matching damage on the rear of the main body. This, she realised, must have been where the Prometheus made impact.

Cyan engulfed much of the rear of the vessel in a blast-radius halo, staining the entire arc from the body through to the inside surfaces of both trailing arms – presumably damage from the resulting catastrophic explosion. How the ship was in one piece at all remained a mystery; she could only assume that the Engineers’ advantage of time spent in space had resulted in far more robust vessels, but the stunning difference in crash damage between the two ships was nevertheless astounding beyond description. _They had so much left to learn…_

By now Za’il had his head in one hand, the other half-heartedly twisting the vessel to-and-fro between pinched fingers as he tried to make sense of just _how much_ of the ship was lit up in blue. The projection, unlike that of the lifeboat, also showed up internal systems in a state of disrepair. Just what it all meant was beyond her, but given the position of at least some of the components in screamingly dark blue, she assumed propulsion had fared no better than her own ship’s. Given the scale of the ship, any attempt at repairs would likely be even more of an undertaking than what they faced with the lifeboat.

Releasing a heavy, exasperated breath, he flicked the projection aside with an overwhelmed wave and leaned back as he rubbed at his face with both hands, collapsing against the couch cushions behind him. The projected juggernaut spun in place with the gesture for a few seconds before coming to rest with the rear facing toward Shaw, who had since lost interest in the huge alien vessel and instead turned her attention towards its huge alien crewman; lips pursed thin as he stared into the abyss beyond the walls of the lifeboat, his furrowed brows seemed less like he was deep in thought and more like something resembling despair. As the two broken holograms hung before her, she couldn’t say she blamed him.

Though she couldn’t imagine the two technologies were even remotely compatible, she had to wonder if there was an even distant possibility for both their resources and skills to be combined into at least one functioning ship. At this point, she would entertain any idea, no matter how mad; the mere thought of being stuck on this world for the rest of her days would drive her quickly to insanity, even if the Engineer had started to provide somewhat better company in the last few hours.

Just what _were_ his skills, though? It struck her that she knew so little about him, still, courtesy of their painful language barrier and gaping chasm in technological standards. Or, perhaps, it was because she’d never bothered to ask him, such was her focus on survival. Even in her unending curiosity about him, she hadn’t had the chance to ask any personal questions – he certainly hadn’t helped in that regard, such was his apparent propensity to either deflect to the task at hand, or return fire with a barrage of questions of his own.

Dark eyes fell upon her as she began scratching haphazardly at the pad of paper, finding a free space on the rapidly filling page; it was more and more evident by the minute that their escape would require more than just teamwork, and to form as much a cohesive unit as they could despite their remarkable differences, they would both need more information about each other. _Knowledge is power_.

She handed the awaiting Engineer her message. _What was your job on the ship?_

The question seemed to shake him from his despondency with more efficiency than she’d expected; his demeanour immediately snapped to the business-as-usual persona that constantly distracted him from the abyss of his thoughts, though as he began to press pen to paper, he hesitated, glancing between the vessel and the Human before him a handful of times, casting the open dictionary glowing on the tablet screen a quick look before finally jotting a single lexicon and handing it back to her.

This was a word she hadn’t seen before, though she had expected as much; in fact, it was so unfamiliar that she could have sworn she’d never seen it even scroll past during her hundreds of sojourns up and down the full extent of the translations. Up and down she went regardless, struggling to find a word even similar. It made sense – these words were of an ancient language, spoken by an ancient civilisation. How would they have words for starship operations if they hadn’t, presumably, ever even _seen_ the technology?

A pair of huge, translucent index fingers and thumbs gently tugged both the pad of paper and the tablet from her grasp. She’d lost track of how long she’d spent scrolling up and down, but her expression, wrought of confusion and concentration, must have given her away. Mimicking her movements with remarkable accuracy, Za’il adapted to the Human technology almost immediately as he flicked through page after page of translations with his left hand, the right poised with a pen to...who knows.

Despite the controlled grace of the movements, his more haphazard scrolling from page to page did not slip by unnoticed. The likely culprit, she realised, was the fact that they were all in _English_ alphabetical order – he was likely left trying to assemble sense from what must seem an entirely random order amongst nonsense. One area received special attention as he combed through it, scrutinising almost every word and apparently coming up blank as he shook his head and eventually moved on; he likely couldn’t find the word he wanted either.

At last, he opted for a string of words instead; the pinched expression on his face suggested it was less than ideal, but would do. She took back the items as he offered them, recognising three from previous translations throughout the past few days, and diligently set about finding the fourth–

He’d left the dictionary open on the page she needed. _A gentleman and a scholar!_

She couldn’t help but grin as the message became clear; quite right it did the role no justice, but nevertheless it made sense.

_I fly the ship._

“Pilot,” she murmured, realising there was not a hope in Hell there would be a word for that in ancient Sumerian. “Helmsman, maybe.”

A large finger tentatively prodded at the question she had written, then pointed back at her.

Shaw exhaled hard and heavy through a pout; how on Earth does one explain her role to the unwitting subject of her excavations through the mouthpiece of another? She shook her head and laughed, much to his apparent surprise, as she once again set about stabbing at the tablet with a finger.

How would she even put it to words?

After an extended period of trial and error, quietly thankful for Za’il’s apparent patience, she finally cobbled together something she hoped made at least _some_ sense.

_I study ancient civilisations by looking at the things they leave behind._

He seemed to stare at the message for a significant period of time, though he gave no indication as to whether the context was lost on him or whether it read as complete nonsense. After a drawn moment his gaze fell upon the stack of magazines, understanding slowly seeping into his expression; eventually they trailed back outside, scanning what remained of the towers in the distance, the shadows cast by his ship, and the uninhabited wasteland between. She wondered if it had become clear to him why they were here at this point, though there must be a million things fighting for his attention right now; she just hoped he didn’t feel like she was merely _studying him_.

Forcing himself from his reverie, he picked up one of the pens and reached across the table, drawing a line underneath the last few words of her initial question. The pressure of the pen against her knee vaguely tickled, but given she wasn’t normally the ticklish kind, she wondered if it had less to do with actual ticklishness and more because everything about the creature was strange, different, and obviously alien. _What was your job_ _on the ship_ _?_

Perhaps they were starting to think more and more alike despite all their differences, because she had prepared for that exact question. In fact, it left her quietly chuckling. She penned a response and handed it back to him.

_Passenger._

The expression that met hers was distinctly unamused, tinged with disbelief. His brow furrowed as he glanced between the page and the Human several more times, before he exhaled heavily and pinched his lips thin, scratching at the top of his smooth head with one hand as he descended into pensive thought.

_Good work, Doctor. Now it’s painfully evident that you’re completely useless. Pilot’s going to make his own way home. You’re just baggage._

He’d set about scribbling a message back to her after a quiet moment that she’d eagerly filled with self-deprecating tripe; as she decoded it, she couldn’t help but note how starkly it stood at odds with those dark thoughts of hers.

_Then you have a lot to learn very shortly, don’t you?_

* * *

Morning had since arrived with a golden glow that would have reminded her so much of Earth if it weren’t for the enormous radioactive orb occupying a significant portion of the sky above. The days seemed to scream past with unfamiliar vigour on this moon, and it seemed neither of their sleep cycles had come close to adapting.

Unsure of what meal it was time for at this point, Elizabeth had settled for a bowl of fruit and cereal with a large mug of coffee to wash it all down; sitting cross-legged on the couch she’d claimed as she silently observed the landscape outside, she found herself once again wondering what it would be like to share all of these experiences with people back home on Earth. What would they think of the incredible peak stretching well beyond the outer reaches of the atmosphere, thick with snow and glowing yellow in the morning light? What would they make of the Engineer, given the vast and conflicting views the billions had of extraterrestrial life? What would _any_ of this do to their beliefs, this newfound knowledge, this whole world, standing at odds with so much of what Humans had known for millennia?

What had it done to _her_ beliefs?

At this point, she dared not think too deeply about it. She wasn’t even sure how she’d assumed coming here wouldn’t be the mother of all Pandora’s Boxes, probing at everything she knew and calling into question everything she had ever taken for granted.

Instead, she turned her attention back to her guest. Hunched over the table in a manner that couldn’t have been comfortable, though he was afforded little choice, he had set about making short work of a double-serving of spaghetti not too dissimilar to the first meal they had shared. She still didn’t know whether it was a deliberate selection on his part or whether it was simply the meal he’d disliked the least from what had been offered, but it had been the result of a rather interesting lesson on operating the food dispenser moments earlier.

It had been his stomach rather than hers that had grumbled after hours upon hours of not eating, and she supposed it made sense; the last time she’d known him to consume anything had been the cold leftovers of the breakfast he’d hardly touched earlier, and she’d been fast asleep at the time. An entire evening had passed since then, and while she’d forgotten to eat throughout the entire period, she was left regretting it the moment she’d heard the deep, roiling gurgle from his insides across the table.

He had followed her to the bar this time, watching with intrigue as he leaned against the counter a distance behind her. After a period of indecisiveness, flitting between jotting him the question of what he’d like to eat and simply pulling up one of the meals she’d previously presented, she finally decided to poke around with the menu and see if it had a more visual display option; lists in English were of no use to anyone but her.

Some determined sifting about had seen success, however, and the display now showed photographs of the meals programmed into the food dispenser rather than an intimidating wall of, to him, alien text. She had motioned for him to come and join her, and after a moment’s hesitation, he had stepped alongside her and crouched down. Distressingly, even when hunched against his ankles, he was _still_ taller than her, albeit by a mere smidge. He watched intently as she showed him how to scroll through the options, how to reorganise them, and how to double the portion size. Why he’d chosen to crouch more than a metre from her left her somewhat perplexed, perhaps distantly insulted, though she had shuffled to her right to allow him to get closer to the machine in the somewhat confined space beside the bar.

It was only when she paced back within arm’s reach of the panel that some understanding crept into her psyche; within close range, she couldn’t help but notice the subtle but immensely distracting scent of the creature, flooding her mind with a thousand-and-one unrelated thoughts with a ferocity that left her stammering as she forgot what it was she was trying to say. Not that it mattered; he couldn’t understand a word she said anyway.

Clarity returned as she stepped away again, forcing herself to give him space and instead clear the dishwasher in search of appropriate crockery for...breakfast? Breakfast. She noted he’d stared dumbly at the panel for a few moments thereafter, jaw slightly agape and eyes unseeing, before clearing his throat, shaking his head and setting about thumbing through the meal options with pointed, deliberate focus.

Now, with apparently safer distance between them, he had made a significant dent in the meal he’d chosen. Rather than follow her lead with a strong coffee, she noted he’d opted for a stiff glass of what remained of the Gin & Tonic; it was impossible to tell how long he’d been awake at this point, but given the dark rings that had formed beneath his sleepy, half-lidded eyes, she supposed it was a fitting end to what must have been a long, exhausting, thought-wracked day. Despite the temptation to do so, she knew it would be pointless trying to synchronise her own sleep pattern with the planet’s swift day-night cycle if they were just going to up and leave in the coming…

Who knows how long it would take, realistically – with two damaged ships needing significant repairs before either was going anywhere, it wasn’t actually as outlandish a thought as she’d initially assumed.

Having finished his meal as she drained the last of her coffee, Za’il had set about sleepily rubbing his face with one hand, pawing at his eyes as an immense yawn overcame him. She watched with vague amusement as he blinked away the aftermath, forcing just a little more consciousness upon himself as he picked up the pad of paper and scratched a message against it.

_I need to sleep. Then we should continue planning our escape._

Offering an understanding nod and a gentle smile, she set about penning a response.

_The bed is more comfortable, if you prefer._

He craned his neck in the direction of the bedroom from his seat on the couch, as if by reflex. He’d been in there, he knew what it looked like. After brief consideration, eyes trailing between the curved cushions of the couch and the rumpled corner of the bed visible from their position, he seemed to decide the latter was the better option.

He offered her the faintest quirk of a smile as he stood, stretched, and sleepily padded toward the bedroom.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not dead, and no, this story hasn’t been forgotten – I understand all your fears, fellow readers, given just how many unfinished gems litter this fandom! I’ve just been absolutely slain with work after a week on holiday elsewhere in the country, and catching up on it all has just about ruined me.
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> Interestingly, I had originally decided to cram a whole craptonne more into this chapter. There was about four to six thousand more words that could have been put in here, but given the absurdly short character lengths for works on DA, and given how naturally it’s tailed off here (without a cliffhanger, gasp), I’ve decided to reserve it all for the next.
> 
> There should be some action soon!
> 
> And I promise I won’t abandon this (as much as everyone says that) – I’ve already started work on the sequel, and have huge plans for both the third story in the series as well as the Engineer’s version of events, so I’m quite urgently focusing on actually FINISHING this story so I can move on to others.


	9. Silence

It seemed such a waste to sleep the day away, out cold for the sunniest hours amid calm weather when it was never certain when the next violent sandstorm would sweep through and force them inside for days on end, but Shaw had battled long and hard over this decision, agonising over it far more than she ought to have, before resigning herself to a quick nap to keep her going. It felt as though her life revolved around the basics at this point, lost in the world of her own head as she drifted from meal to meal, sleep to sleep, gradually making headway on some sort of plan to leave this place, but never quite far enough to begin building hope.

Rather than plucking arbitrary times to sleep from thin air, simply staying awake until she couldn't keep her eyes open, it made sense to bring some sort of order to the chaos that surrounded her. Naturally, she was left trying to choose between the disconcertingly short days, their shifts not too far from that of Earth but enough that it fought with her own, longer circadian rhythm – or to submit to pure guesswork, sleeping when the Engineer slept and hoping he woke her up once he was done. Neither were ideal, and she realised just how much she'd taken the days on Earth for granted, no matter how long, no matter the season; however, given her priority lay with finding a way off this planet, it simply made sense to at least _try_ to spend as many waking hours as possible with Za'il.

It wasn't because she enjoyed his company, mind. Their struggle to communicate was exhausting at the best of times, and more than anything she longed to have a simple conversation with someone, _anyone_ , that didn't involve rubbing her finger raw as she scrolled up and down through an ancient, supposedly dead language with no living speakers aside from a two thousand-year-old alien, when it wasn't even his native tongue. It was just the only link either of them had remotely in common. It was so goddamn _lonely_ stuck here like this. She may as well have been the only being left alive.

Really? Was that _really_ how she felt?

_No. Absolutely not._

Had she truly been alone, she doubted she'd still be alive at all – and it wasn't just for the fact that he'd sealed the wound that would otherwise have doomed her, and inadvertently help her slay a monster that would also have otherwise doomed her. Had she somehow, _somehow_ overcome either of those two significant roadblocks in her survival, she wasn't entirely sure she'd have remained sane enough to go on. It was all too easy to simply step out of the airlock without a helmet, and let fate have its way with her…

Regardless of their language barrier, the enormous alien had kept her mind churning the entire time he was on board, providing a myriad of distractions from her own despair as best as anyone could and then some. As much as his ways and his technology were confoundingly different, his body language had been strikingly _Human_ – if that was a fair comparison to draw. He ate like her, slept like her, felt his emotions like her, grieved like her. He had eventually shown a fascination with art and music that left him seeming that much _less_ alien in her eyes, and she had to admit, the past day had been oddly pleasant with his subtle shift in demeanour she struggled to clearly articulate, other than that he seemed more patient, more interactive, more willing to accept her. It had been reassuring to no longer be all but ignored, and she'd felt it in a deep, fundamental part of her being she couldn't quite identify.

It was during times like these, she realised, she was most reassured by nestling up against Charlie and rambling endlessly at him as he held her, quietly responding in the affirmative at something approximating the right times, sometimes so overwhelmed by the ferocity of her emotions that she found herself, embarrassingly, mumbling through a flood of tears. As ridiculous as it was, it always felt so refreshing – there was power and validation in releasing a torrent of feelings better shed than held, and seeking solace against another person's skin.

A twisted, disobedient part of her mind had the audacity to grapple with the idea of doing exactly that with the creature snoring in the next room, snuggling against the Human-like flesh she now knew lay beneath his biosuit, ejecting a nonsensical stream of consciousness that he wouldn't understand a word of, simply taking reassurance from the closeness of another living–

_Good God, Elizabeth,_ she fumed. _How can you even consider taking such liberties! You can't just touch people without their consent, and good girls don't just...just…_

_Good girls don't mourn their husbands by fantasising about cuddling up to strange men!_

Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself to her feet. She _hated_ how needy and pathetic her mind could be at times, especially when sleep-addled and disoriented. _You're a grown bloody adult, Doctor. Time to start acting like it!_

Perhaps a shower would snap her to her senses. Perhaps it ought to be a cold one.

Padding silently through the bedroom as she tugged at the mess her hair had become with one hand, she noted the Engineer was still fast asleep, sprawled diagonally across the King bed and yet still needing to curl his legs to stay entirely on the mattress. Still in his biosuit and having ignored the blankets, his arms coiled around the pillow she hadn't used while his head remained perched at its very end. It wasn't the most elegant sleeping position, but it seemed he had at least a little more room to move than he did on the couch.

Feathering the drawers as quietly as she possibly could, she set about collecting more fresh clothes to change into; she found a pair of shorts that were perhaps a little _too_ short for her tastes but would likely fit, a singlet, and a soft, hooded jacket that would allow her a little more freedom of movement than the turtleneck clinging to her form. It would do. With that, she silently slunk into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

With the last shower's meltdown never far from her mind, she stripped and stepped beneath the raindrops with the express intent to wash away the last two hours of restless, awkward sleep from her body and nothing more, using it to leverage a little more wakefulness and absolutely _not_ using it as an excuse to mope. To keep herself on task, she slipped the temperature down several degrees and forced the strangled shout of surprise to catch in her throat as everything she owned stood on end beneath the relentlessly cold droplets.

It was certainly a fast way of washing her hair, she thought to herself as she raced to rinse the shampoo from it. All-consuming and utterly distracting, it was both the coldest and quickest shower she had ever had; it was also the most effective at achieving its end goal, because she was in and out without having descended into the whirlpool of thought she'd feared would grip her once more.

Quaking as she dried herself off and patted at her hair, she shuffled across the floor with the bath mat gripped between her toes, casting her reflection a passing glance along the way. At least she no longer looked like death, though hunched and shivering was not much of an improvement.

She stole a moment to stare at the pouting woman beyond the glass, wondering what the Hell she was doing presenting herself as the sole example of Humanity to alien eyes. For all the _we come in peace_ and _please enjoy our culture_ her species had engaged in during the last near-two centuries of space-age shenanigans, sending messages out into the aether in the hopes that someone, somewhere was listening, it struck her as laughable that the most extended, most meaningful interactions in history – or at least the last few millennia – with aliens of any kind had been between between a gawky, socially awkward scientist with no business being in space in the first place, and a two thousand-year-old pilot on a mission to destroy her planet.

Given it was safe to assume he was a military man, a soldier of sorts, she believed it was also safe to assume they couldn't be any more different as people, with next to nothing in common, and no reason other than mutual strife to form any sort of meaningful bond.

And yet, to assume as much was to write of the entirety of the last few days.

_God_ , why was she so _paranoid_ about being rejected?

Besides, they _had_ shared things in common. The blasted earworm playing merry hell with her psyche in the furthest vestiges of her mind was a testament to that.

She was sure he had been asleep for at least six hours by this point; perhaps he wouldn't mind a bit of a ruckus. God knew she needed to create one; a distraction was long overdue, and an old itch had made itself known ever since the Engineer had invaded her dreams with his slow, sombre, heartfelt enjoyment of the admittedly over-the-top piano taking up an inordinate amount of space in the main body of the craft.

Patting her hair dry and tugging her clothes on with renewed fervour, she kicked aside the day's dirtied garments and slipped out of the bathroom as quietly as she could, as if she wasn't about to wake the poor bastard with what was doomed to be a fairly shoddy attempt to blow out the cobwebs after all these years.

Her fingers grabbed and flexed with excitement as she slid the bedroom door shut behind her and shuffled over to the piano stool, faintly amused at her own enthusiasm, struggling to remember a time she was so eager to just stop, relax, and enjoy a tune or three. In fact, she could barely remember the last time she'd even _played_ a piano, such was the pressure to focus on her violin, and such was the subsequent pressure, once she was old enough, to focus on her studies. Even if much of that pressure had been purely self-inflicted.

The keys were cool and smooth beneath her fingertips, nothing like the scooped, weathered, stained ivory of the instrument in her recent dream, and a far cry from the plastic of the electronic unit she'd last played. It didn't take much to come to the conclusion that the baby grand was new, almost completely untouched, save the odd tune-up and the Engineer's earlier playing.

It didn't take much to assume that it was an _expensive_ example, either. Delightfully weighted and ringing out with the most magnificent of sounds, the first notes her fingers fell upon immediately sent a chill down her spine.

Unprompted, her hands set about pecking away at the first thing that came to mind; an easy song she had not played in a very long time found its way to her fingertips as her eyes drifted closed, muscle memory taking control and leaving the rest of her to drift elsewhere.

And elsewhere it drifted.

In a breath she was in the sticky heat of a Mediterranean summer evening, perched upon a metal stool in the outdoor section of a restaurant she could only describe as 'cute', the cool silken touch of the keys becoming iced, dewdrop glass against her fingertips and memory flooding her nostrils with the crisp bite of limes and mint. The tune at her hands had been played by someone far more rehearsed and skillful that night, dancing across far more weathered keys as it fought for dominance over the hubbub of clinking glasses and clattering cutlery, at one with the burble of the bustling cobblestone streets beyond the wrought iron curls and twists of the restaurant's outer street-front gates.

The scent of parmesan and tomato had since given way to limoncello and vanilla as the moon rose high and full in the sky, bathing the paths weaving down the coastal cliff face in pale blue and bringing with it the lightest of summer breezes; the ocean beyond had stilled, twinking in bright, shiny ripples beneath the evening light, constantly drawing her eyes toward it as the sultry sound of the piano became one with her as the night dragged on. It was one of the few times she could recall truly being present in the moment, not bothering to commit it to memory as she let it envelop her psyche in the full knowledge it would remain with her for aeons for simply being so tangible, a delight to every sense she possessed.

Faces had faded from her memory, such was their irrelevance to that moment. There had been several at the table, discussing the dig they were on at the time, lamenting their discoveries so far and musing those yet to come. At that stage, she realised, she'd already begun focusing on other, more important discoveries, chipping away at her theories in secret, attending these digs with a paycheck in mind, slowly accumulating the funding required to push herself in a new direction. It had been a turning point of sorts, when she had finally realised that blithely churning ahead in a preselected march, dancing to the beat of the drum assigned to her, was not the only viable way to go about life. In a way, perhaps, it had been the first time fire had made itself known in her belly; it had upset the veritable apple card laden with _should_ and _duty_ and _sensibility_ , replacing it with a driving want, an itching _need_ for something greater.

Her fingers paused against the keys as a thought struck her; that drive had led her straight here, to this very moment, sitting alone on an alien world, mulling over everything that had laid the foundations to this supremely unenviable position.

Sticking one's neck out against the advice of others leading to tragedy and calamity; what a novel thought.

_Shut up, Elizabeth,_ she scolded as she idly plucked nonsense with her right hand. _Focusing on everything bad that's happened is going to overshadow any good that can come of this._

_Ah yes, good. Lots of good has happened in the last few weeks. Let's list some of it, shall we?_

Fingers freezing against the keys again, she pursed her lips together firmly as she drew a blank. Why was she even entertaining the idea?

Her breath was quick to follow suit, hitching in her windpipe. _It's a bit harsh to forget about the one, singular living Engineer, isn't it?_

_He has a name, damnit._

When she thought about it, marinating in self-pity really _was_ washing out any of the good that had happened, painting discovery in grey. What had initially been a murderous, violent creature had turned out to be far more complex and nuanced in nature, and in confusion that paralleled her own, had somehow become a remarkably reliable ally. Once again she stumbled upon the realisation that her position was thus far unique, and despite the carnage that had befallen her, she really ought to be far more grateful than she currently was.

So much of her simply ached to reach out, to place a hand against his chest and grasp at his soul, to _truly_ understand him as time pushed him further and further from the podium of a god to the flesh and blood of a mortal no different to herself.

Once again her fingers idly plucked at random, caressing the slick surfaces beneath their tips as they slid from key to key. It was unfortunate, really, that she'd never truly thrown herself at music. The ability was there, but her interest had wavered enough that nothing ever came of it and she was left marvelling at the outstanding abilities of others. When presented with sheet music her playing had almost infamously grown stilted and robotic, with her best reserved for moments of ad-lib or tapping out a song from memory, often unrelated to the instrument she had at hand.

The desire to toy with the latter overcame her as her hands set about it on impulse, quietly massaging out an old tune that occasionally showed up as an earworm in dark moments where a few feel-good lyrics found themselves in hot demand. Soft rock or not, her mind made light work of transmuting almost anything to whatever she had her hands on, and it wasn't long before both hands were bringing it to life, dragging her eyes closed once again as the music drew her in with fervour she hadn't felt in years and years.

Sound flowed from her as a burst dam, binding every inch of emotion she'd felt these last few days into something far more tangible, rippling from her flesh to the air, from memory to resonating sound; it was release in every sense of the word, with only lyrics missing with the distrust of her own voice, refusing to allow it to trip up the rest as it came.

Had her playing become so loud, so involved, that she'd missed the soft pad of footsteps from further down the vessel, missed the soft, awestruck breaths that lingered nearby? Her eyes squeaked open to find the enormous figure of the Engineer standing at the far end of the piano, utterly transfixed as a thousand emotions played amongst the black of his eyes, his pale, sleepy face contorted in a mixture of confusion and wonder.

It occurred to her that this was a new benchmark for how much attention he could pay her. In fact, this might be the most _anyone_ had ever been so consumed by anything she had done apart from the most obvious, intimate examples that would now remain forever with the dead; something in her belly stirred beneath his intent gaze, offering him an unbidden quirk of the lips as her hands dug into the keys with renewed strength. Ah, yes, the cobwebs were most certainly torn apart by now.

A new song came to mind just as the last came to an end; her grin broadened as he shifted in kind, eyes never leaving her as he crouched out of arm's reach beside her. Perhaps more mellow, perhaps more uplifting, she didn't quite know where her hands would take her as she begun to play, but with such an avid audience, she suspected a little showing-off may come in to bat as the tune progressed.

What a strange thing to have done to have achieved his undivided attention.

Words hung silently about her lips as her eyes fell closed once more, but no longer seeing him seemed to only amplify his presence. _Oh, whoops, there goes the showing-off part._ She could have sworn she heard him suck in a breath.

Perhaps he wouldn't notice the fumbling amongst the showboating. It had certainly been a while.

When she glanced back at him amid a crescendo of noise, she noted his eyes were squarely upon her hands as the danced. Her own followed suit reflexively, more carefully watching the keys as they demanded more of her, dragging the tune from the bowels of her memory, suddenly regretting leaving that section of her trusty playlists to gather dust. Once again, she was left wondering just how he'd had the infinite bad luck of _this particular Human_ as his sole experience with the species.

Another came to mind before she had any intention of leaving her perch. An old classic wrapped in a thousand enigmatic messages, open to any interpretation one could make of it, the melody flowed from the end of one song and straight into the next. Its lyrics hung against her lips as she mused her own interpretation, verse after verse, its distinct lack of any repeating chorus an endless fascination point for her and the world over; while she knew she was in a minority, she had always thought the tale of the song to be a warning against fake gods, against taking the tangible and the man-made as a replacement for faith, for God Himself. She simply didn't buy that it could be a rumination against worship as a whole, that it could take away from the Human spirit rather than amplify it. In fact, she preferred to ignore the entire commentary on the Human condition. Instead, she focused on distracting herself with a more intense assault on the keys before her.

For some reason, playing it seemed that much more poignant before a creature that she had regarded as a god for so long, hardly neon, hardly of her own creation, but one she had belatedly taken beyond the scriptures to the point he may as well be.

Her pale god had wide, damp eyes. Kneeling before her, it was if he had seen her, truly seen her, for the first time.

How apt.

He remembered to breathe as her fingers stilled, drifting away from the keys as she cracked her wrists one after another, gaze drifting back to the Engineer with a grin that was far more pleased than smug. He returned it with something vastly more complex – the same awe as before, but almost _haunted_ , woven amongst what could only have been _understanding_.

She squeezed his shoulder with a broadening grin as she stood, taking a little too much pleasure in his frozen gawp.

Diverting past the food dispenser on her way to the couch, Shaw ordered another coffee with an extra espresso shot, heaped an overzealous teaspoon of sugar into it, and sought her seat out, stirring the powerful concoction the whole way across the room. She noted that Za'il had barely shaken himself from his stupor, having only dragged himself back to his feet as she sat down, and seemed to prefer to linger by the piano in catatonic awe. Part of her wondered if he'd finally blown a headgasket after her little performance.

A press of a button had the holographic projection of the lifeboat shimmering back into existence with a faint _fizz_. To no surprise, nothing had changed since the last time she viewed it; the port side of the vessel remained several flavours of ruined. She sipped at her coffee as she ran through her list of dead-ends once more, trying to find a way to refloat either vessel by any means, scratching around at the depths of her mind to find options that hadn't yet been explored. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to accept that they'd done all they could.

She was preoccupied enough that she barely noticed Za'il finally find a seat on the opposite couch, barely acknowledging him as he poured himself a glass of water and threw it back in one go. The Engineer simply shook his head as he observed her, silently pondering the situation himself as she twisted and turned the holo to and fro, eventually reaching for an object somewhat larger but otherwise similar to the projector he'd brought on board and left sitting alongside hers.

The utter silence of the room made it all the more startling when his eyes grew wide out of nowhere, dropping the device in his hand as he bellowed something short, sharp and deafening enough that it left the glasses from here to the bar ringing. He descended into breathless, incoherent babble as Shaw recoiled as if burnt, instinctively huddling on the couch as the mighty Engineer stood abruptly and paced toward the window in three inhumanly broad strides.

Her ears rang long after the glasses had stilled; a voice like that could wake the dead. It made sense, she supposed, that his roar would be that much louder than a Human's, particularly in a quiet, confined space; his lung capacity and vocal chords alike must be significantly larger and more robust than her own, and she'd expected as much from the first time she heard him speak on the bridge of his own ship. Nevertheless, logic could not offset the overwhelming shot of adrenaline his sudden burst of unnecessarily loud activity had brought about, leaving her hands shaking.

Punctuating the end of his rant with his own name and emphasising it by slapping his forehead with an open palm as he stared out the window, awareness finally picked at his frustration as he turned toward the cowering Human on the couch. His eyes widened when he finally noticed her hunched, shaking poise despite the vague understanding in her eyes, frantically waving a large, white hand as he repeatedly murmured what she assumed to be an apology – she had heard it several times by now, and the context was similar to previous murmurings. Expelling a long breath, tailing off into a distant hint of exasperated laughter, he paced back toward the couch and sat down with another heavy breath as he shook his head.

Huge fingers snatched at a pen and dragged the pad back onto one thigh. Chewing his bottom lip for a moment, he glanced back and forth between the woman on the couch and the paper before him, finally shaking his head again in apparent disbelief and writing her a note.

_I'm an idiot.  
This is a military base. There will be other ships._

She couldn't help but mirror his expression once she'd translated, one hand entangled in her hair as she, too, shook her head and laughed. Knowing that would have saved them both a fair bit of anguish.

Before she could ask him _where_ by way of awkwardly-scrawled foreign lexicons, he had pulled up a holographic projection of a different kind on his own tech; a map of the tunnels she had explored days earlier wove its way through thin air in beams of light, quickly etching well past what she had grown to recognise and into the depths of the towers they hadn't had a chance to touch. The underground network was _huge_ ; it struck her as pure, unadulterated _luck_ that they'd landed where they had, explored where they had, and stumbled upon the one, single survivor of whatever had happened aboard a docked ship as quickly as they had. They could easily have explored from the other end for months without ever having found him.

It left her wondering whether they would have suffered an entirely different fate had they simply landed at the other end of the facility, exploring the tower at the far end rather than the one they'd started with.

A bright, white, pulsing dot toward the south end of the projection showed the location of the lifeboat as it sat, with the crashed Engineer ship looming between it and the bulk of the towers streaking to the north in a long, symmetrical line. Za'il almost immediately set about twisting the hologram about, pursing his lips in a thoughtful pout as his fingers traced an array of circular hoops ringing the outer edges of the network. Those, she presumed, would be the hangars throughout the base.

Pausing to grasp the object he'd thrown several minutes ago, the Engineer stood back up and held it in the direction of the towers as he stepped toward the window. Gradually, the detail in the map above the table fleshed out with blips of colour, bleeding and wisping into the outlines of unfamiliar vessels and pods, flooding the occasional room with light, and laying a small handful of pinpoints of green throughout the structure. It took more than a minute of patience before the process finally resolved, but once no more new detail came to light, Za'il finally returned to his seat and set the device aside.

Her initial impressed awe faded as she took note of the deep, troubled scowl opposite her, illuminated by the haze of light hanging over the table; a pair of index fingers and thumbs dragged apart as they pinched different sections of the map, rapidly zooming in on individual hangars and tracing their tunnels to the next. Most of them didn't capture his attention for long, even the ones containing ships with recognisably similar configurations to the one the Prometheus had deliberately crashed into. One, significantly smaller and rounder than the wreck in the canyon, earned more than its fair share of interest; alone at the furthest reaches of the fourth tower from the south, almost as far from the lifeboat as possible,it lacked any of the blips of dark blue that the other vessels had scattered through their interiors in sporadic smatterings. The path to it was also devoid of colour, unlike the tunnels further south that were speckled, if not bathed, in green.

The second ship that caught his eye was almost directly connected to the first via two tunnels that met at the north edge of the fourth tower. This one shared the same huge, horseshoe-shaped configuration as the crashed warship, and, like the smaller, rotund blob, lacked any colour. None of the blue blips, none of the green rings.

His scowl deepened. There was one, singular green-cyan blip in the tunnel leading away from the smaller vessel.

"What does this mean?" She raised an index finger to the blip in the tunnel. The fact that her question had caused him to jump was not lost on her.

Expelling a long sigh that vibrated his lips, his gaze froze on the pulsing pale point as his hands reached for the pad. Pressing the nib of the nearest pen against the paper, he proceeded to simply make a heavy dent in the page, unmoving and caught in thought. Eyes darting between the blip, the nib and the Human, he appeared completely lost for words.

Eventually he settled with tearing the messy page at the top free and exposing a new leaf, tossing the pad onto the table and leaning over it with an intently thoughtful expression on his face. The very tip of his pale tongue appeared at the corner of his lips as he traded lexicons for a series of arcs and lines, filling almost a quarter of the page with what was steadily evolving into less of a string of foreign words, as she'd come to expect, and into more of a _drawing_.

When he turned the page on its axis and pushed the pad toward her, she was struck by just how much detail he'd crammed into the space. He was no artist, but he was clearly handy enough with a pen that she could readily make out the shape of something vaguely humanoid – or at least bipedal. The head of the drawing was absolutely bizarre, eyeless where its face ought to have been and ending, rearward, in an excessively long, tooth-like point. The _thing_ 's back was peppered with similar triangular spines, and the rest of it appeared almost insectoid with its armour-like, all claws and bones and ribs and sinew.

Its featureless face was a sight to behold, to the point she wondered if this was all artistic license. He had gone to the trouble of filling the horror's mouth with bizarre, terrifying teeth. Was he trying to make a point?

Her eyes darted between the page and the Engineer; hardly joking, his expression was grim. Pinched. Nervous. Her _offspring_ flashed to mind. Horrifyingly, he was deadly serious.

"The Hell is this thing?" She whispered, holding up a straightened hand parallel to the floor. Raising and powering it as she prodded the drawing with her other hand, she hoped he would elaborate on the size of whatever the thing was.

Having regarded her for a brief moment as the cogs turned, he gently took the pad back and etched a second figure, recognisably Humanoid, followed by a third, far smaller creature. The latter lacked the second's robust torso and featured subtle curves instead, and...Medusa-like ripples emanating from its head. The faceless additions lost every inch of mystery the moment he returned the drawings to her; the taller of the two had the vague outlines of an Engineer in something approximating a biosuit, a head shorter than the monstrosity on the right-most side of the page. The figure to its left, despite the clumsy and amusingly inaccurate attempt at replicating hair, was clearly intended to be _her_ , barely standing as tall as the centre figure's waist.

She drew a long breath. Nausea tugged at her innards. The alien creature was _huge_.

Reaching up as Shaw stared, her jaw agog, Za'il continued exploring the network of hallways and hangars glowing in white. Much to his very obvious disappointment, the majority of the tunnels either led to empty hangars, ships dotted in blue, or were festooned with a haze of lime green; no amount of sliding, pinching and darting about seemed to reveal alternatives. Even with the enormity of the base, their options were apparently severely limited.

Finally tearing her eyes from the abomination with a visceral shudder, Shaw caught the Engineer's gaze again as she raised a hand toward one of the dark blue blips at the forward section of the ship closest to her. "I'm not sure if I want to know now, but what do the blue dots mean?"

This one, apparently, he could translate. At the bottom of the page, he penned a few lexicons – the latter he eventually scrubbed out with hurried strokes, replacing it with two somewhat more familiar-looking characters, and turned it back to her.

_Died in deep sleep._

That made sense, she supposed. Taking the liberty of zooming the projection back out with fumbling hands, mind fighting them as they sought to use the Prometheus' user interface style, her eyes traced the hangars lining the perimeter eventually finding the crashed ship outside. Three blue blips sat toward the forward section. She presumed they were not Ford, Jackson and Weyland, but rather, the corpses of his less lucky crewmates..

Blue dots littered all but three other vessels, the third sitting to the west of the second tower, barricaded by a tunnel choking on fluorescent green. She raised a hesitant finger to the mess, her trepidation mirroring the Engineer's.

Taking back the pad, Za'il pressed his lips thin as he began sketching a fourth figure that consumed much of the space remaining at the top of the page. This illustration immediately appeared less clear, his hand hesitating over details and scrubbing to correct them as he debated just how they should be. Still, whatever he was drawing was heavily detailed regardless. He paused on several occasions to suck in a breath, apparently holding it for extended periods. This was clearly a task he was not enjoying.

The figure he finally decided upon clearly had no translation that would make any sense to her innocent, Human ear; larger, heavier, more deadly than the pointed creature on the right, this monster exuded death even in rough, awkward pen strokes. Its whiplash tail and bulbous, cylindrical head were so significantly _alien_ she found her mind's eye coming up blank for what it might look like in person, aside from terrifying.

Shaw regarded the illustrations with frozen horror at length, responding only when she felt the Engineer's gaze burning at her skin. Hand grasping at the tablet, she snatched a pen with the other and scratched a question in a free space well below the horrifying drawings.

_Can we sneak past this one?_ She handed the pad back, poking an index finger at the right-most, pointier-looking creature.

He shook his head, penning a response.

_No, it will try to kill us on sight. We will have to strike first._

She swallowed, flicking through the dictionary as she pressed the nib to paper again.

_Is there any other way around?_

_No,_ he scratched. _The hangars are isolated._

Chewing on a lip as her knee bounced, Elizabeth grasped at any idea that came to mind, rolling the hologram back and forth before her as she entertained every silly thought that surfaced. Each option faded to obscurity, however, as she realised there was a very long way indeed to even _get there_ in the first place. She filled more empty space with another question.

_How do we get to the first hangar?_

"Uh," he Engineer mused aloud before expelling a heavy sigh. With nothing forthcoming, he eventually scrawled a hasty response with one hand as he gripped his head with the other.

_Good question._

Frankly, she was unsure she even had the physical prowess for _any_ of what was required here; she could barely fend off a foot-long raging octopus, let alone a ten-foot tall bipedal nightmare exuding certain doom. The walk alone would probably kill her, well before she even got to see what the monstrosity looked like in the flesh. The hangars were damn near impossible to reach from what she understood, having traipsed through kilometres of tunnels to stumble upon the one they'd found Za'il in, and that was by far the closest to the lifeboat. These were at the opposite end of the base, and the tunnels leading to them were foaming with green haze that she could only imagine were many, many examples of the leftmost monstrosity he had sketched for her benefit. In fact, even being _near_ one of the hangars opening up had damn-near killed her–

Suddenly inspired, she scribbled the most horrifically asymmetrical circle known to Man, complete with the jagged, curved teeth of a half-opened hangar. He squinted at the awkwardly-shaped maw as she added two tiny stick figures on one of the teeth, one twice the height of the other, finishing with a hooped arrow pointing from their heads to the abyss at the centre of the circle before handing the sketch back to Za'il.

Glancing between the mess on the page and its creator several times, the Engineer appeared to consider the logistics of it all before declaring something a fair bit louder than he really needed to, punctuating it with an impressed laugh and reaching across the table, through the hologram, to give her upper arm an enthusiastic clap that jolted her from her perch on the couch. She couldn't help but mirror his broad grin regardless, warmed by how much it lit up his pale features. She was patently aware of the fact it was the first grin she had seen on him. Not so secretly, she hoped to see many more.

Scribbling enthusiastically across the rapidly-filling page in a fresh spot, Za'il penned a question and slipped the pad back onto her knees expectantly.

_Do you have weapons and…_ The last word proved to be a mystery after scrolling from top to bottom a couple of times.

He slipped his thumb beneath the heaviest, metallic section of his biosuit, tapping at it with an opposing fingernail. At her best guess, she presumed, in context, he was asking if she had armour. Of course, she had nothing of a sort, and shook her head.

Sizing her up briefly, he exhaled and dragged himself to his feet as he motioned for her to follow. Heading straight for the crates by the airlock, he slipped the lid off the one closest to the main room and knelt as he began rustling through its contents, returning his gaze to her a handful of times as she stood, arms folded across her chest, silently observing him in his refreshing, albeit overwhelming renewed enthusiasm.

Lips quirked to the side, he dragged a small biosuit from the bottom of the box and held it alongside her by the shoulders. Without question it would drown her, its knees dragging by her ankles. An amused snort escaped him, the observation not lost on him either. Murmuring something off-handedly in his own tongue, he cast the suit back into the crate and resumed digging.

Several dark, sectioned individual pieces of gear hit the ground as he upended them from the box one after another; after a little more searching, he turned to fetch a vaguely triangular, torso-shaped group of metallic segments that flexed against each other as they moved, articulating about a set of rib-like bones that gave the whole item form. With the aid of a small handheld device, the outermost segments unclipped themselves and clattered to the deck with deep, resounding _clanks_. Having started off vastly too small to fit him anywhere, the article quickly became ludicrously tiny when he held it up for inspection.

After a moment of quiet observation, the Engineer reached an arm out and tugged gently at the thick, baggy jacket obscuring the upper half of her before holding up the modified chestpiece demonstratively. _Of course. If he's going to modify something to fit me, he's going to need it to be at least somewhat accurate._ A deep red crept across her cheeks, leaving them burning as she unzipped the jacket and let it drop to the floor; she was thankful that today, of all days, she'd chosen to wear a singlet underneath. Alien or not, the last thing she had on her mind was standing around in her underwear in front of strange men.

The Engineer froze in place as he raised the armour to her, eyes transfixed on the blotchy, purple, finger-shaped bruises encircling both her biceps. Following his gawp, he realised she'd all but forgotten about them; he, on the other hand, must have only just realised how much stronger than her she was.

Expression obviously mortified, he raised a hand to one of the bruises, fingers lingering an inch from her tarnished flesh as the gears in his head ground to a shuddering halt. The bruises aligned perfectly with the digits he held before them, the dim light above casting shadows in their image in the exact position of the mottled, purple mess.

Drawing a breath as words refused to form, he finally expelled a heavy sigh and whispered, several times, words that she had come to recognise as an apology. Not that they were necessary; his eyes spoke them without needing translation. It twisted at her gut. They widened as she grasped at the hand hovering before her, uncomprehending as she offered a gentle smile. "It's fine."

His huge fingers felt like jelly against her grip, limp and yielding. His eyes refused to meet hers. She insisted. "Hey, it's fine. I know you didn't mean to hurt me."

She led the flaccid hand back to the armour still grasped in his other hand, watching with the most compassionate expression she could muster as he focused intently on the item, swallowing hard. He apologised again, offering a weak smile that was more of a grimace.

Getting the armour over her head was simple enough, even if the convolutions of the panels insisted in getting stuck in her hair and pinching it as they moved. Fitting it properly also seemed straightforward, with more sections being shed and rejoined as the chestplate was altered to conform to her body. His suddenly nervous, kid-glove handling of her quickly irritated her, though, and after painfully slow, apprehensive progress, she let out an annoyed grunt that he apparently chose to interpret as impatience. Luckily, the process was all but complete; with the armour trimmed to fit her almost perfectly and reassembled with several other components, he snapped it open along the front seam and released her from its confines.

Quickly tiring of his guilt-wracked, worried expression, she padded across the floor the moment she was free and snatched the pad, tablet and nearest pen from the table. Pacing back over to him as he pointedly fiddled with several other pieces of equipment, she crouched against the crate and assembled a message as hurriedly as she could.

_I'm fine. Let's move forward. What's next?_

He offered a solemn nod after observing her words for an uncharacteristically long moment, whispering one last apology before timidly extracting the pen from her grasp and filling the last of the open space on the page.

_Let's see if we can get this ship off the ground. It's better than walking._

She couldn't help but grin, giving his shoulder a firm tap with one hand. "That's more like it!"

Much to her relief, he grinned in kind. She'd have tapped him across the face if he'd given her even one more infernal apology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two in one weekend, lucky you guys. Please don't expect such rabid updates for a wee while yet. Life has been swamping the living crap out of me of late, and this sudden spurt of activity is just to make up for nearly two weeks of inactivity.
> 
> There are four songs Elizabeth plays in this chapter. They can be anything you like, anything that suits the description, but if you're curious as to what the inspirations are, here they are in order:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2K7D-uMH2g  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqDyxqHXoy8  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OedmOUsRTc  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwc-PBgh8-w
> 
> I'm a fandom n00b of the highest order, and a catastrophic chicken, so I'm having to resort to rather intense research so I can get my morphology even remotely accurate.
> 
> Also worth noting I'm almost always gunning for the upper estimates of creature size, as is my preference with any given fandom. Seems to be little agreement on the size of the Engineers, with some taking the actor's height literally, and others using the drama of the clever camera angles. I want Za'il to stand toe-to-toe with my Enderman character (they meet, good LORD do they meet), and given J'shx is a significant lad at 9'5" (pretty close to Minecraft canon, at 2.9m), that pushes the Engineer into the 9ft bracket at minimum. Just, you know, to make Elizabeth feel reeeeeeallll small.
> 
> Final note. I'm somewhat active over on DA, and I'm slowly chipping away at one of two images that might become a cover for this story. Hunt down MiraiKazuya, and eventually JamesShale over there once I start posting finished stuff, if you're after eventual artwork.


	10. Inertia

Shaw hadn't the foggiest why it hadn't occurred to her to explore the upper deck of the lifeboat. She'd seen the narrow staircase leading to the cockpit a handful of times, passing by enroute to other places within the vessel, but had clearly been so preoccupied with God-knows-what that it hadn't dawned on her to meander up and have a poke around.

It was a far cry from the overbearingly posh microcosm downstairs, completely lacking the grotesque display of ornate wealth in almost every manner; looking every part another mere section of the _Prometheus_ aside from a slight reduction in scale, its tight hallway exuded a far more familiar utilitarian atmosphere.

That lack of scale had proven troublesome for Za'il, who had struggled to fit up the stairwell that was both too short to contain his height and damn-near too narrow for his broad shoulders, then smacked the back of his skull on a thick rafter lining the corridor immediately after the last step. She'd come to recognise the string of profanity that he'd hissed as he clutched his head and found herself thankful she didn't have the translations; her _good girl_ psyche preferred to think of him _swearing like a sailor_ and leaving it at that, her imagination hardly interested in decoding words that would likely leave her blushing.

The cockpit proved to be cut from the same cloth, being a somewhat snug fit for anyone much larger than her – let alone someone of Engineer proportions. Unlike the bridge of the _Prometheus_ , however, it took a far more traditional form, with the pilot taking a seat on the left-hand side of the cramped space, and a matching co-pilot post on the right. A cursory glance of the console revealed what was largely a mirror of the rather complex plethora of digital dials, numbers and illustrations. It was certainly more aircraft than ship to her passenger's gaze.

Having wrestled with the faux-leather seat's controls until it was as preposterously far back as it would go and sitting at its lowest position, the Engineer had set about cramming himself into the claustrophobic space as she slid into the right-hand seat. Sitting came as a welcome relief from the rushing about prior; as per their hurried, haphazardly-assembled plan, they had set about quickly securing as many loose items as they could throughout the vessel, checking every entry-point, and, upon his insistence, completing a remarkably thorough preflight that had brought a few surprises to the table. After checking beneath the vessel for anything malicious hiding in the shadows, he had climbed into the narrow crawl-space between the lifeboat's belly and the rocks it was perched on. _That_ had not been kind on her nerves. All she could foresee happening was the ship shifting and collapsing, crushing him – especially as he began prying and twisting at the misshapen metal around two of the damaged engines.

Thankfully nothing untoward had eventuated, but it had left her heart hammering in her chest to a far greater degree than she liked. She had damn-near leapt out of her skin as he'd paused to spit out a mouthful of dust and dirt that had apparently fallen from the engine he was intent on reshaping and landed on his face in significant volumes, and was left suppressing a shriek of dismay as the ship had, in fact, shifted against the rocks by a mere inch as he pried, but for all her catastrophising, he had emerged grubby but unscathed.

What had seemed to her at the time as ad-hoc panelbeating had apparently been far more of an educated manoeuvre than she'd given credit; conducting another scan and throwing the results onto the holo had cleared much of the red from the underbelly of the ship. The two damaged thrusters had faded to yellow, listing warnings and alerts instead of outright errors. Given she could read those errors and still didn't know what to make of them, she'd been left gobsmacked and somewhat ashamed of the fact that he'd interpreted what needed to be done simply by _looking_ at the holo and comparing it to what he saw in the flesh.

It was reality that language barriers often left one considering the other in a different way to what might have been without it, she had mused with embarrassment; it was all too easy to consider the opposing side as less cultured, less intelligent, or simply lost and helpless. In fact she had fallen prey to that mode of thinking herself, without even realising it, over the past few days – this in spite of her initial worshipful view of both his species and him in particular, ascribing damn-near supernatural powers and omniscient intelligence to them. The Engineer's methodical, reasoned, patient circling and checking of the ship had made flaws in both methods of thinking painfully obvious to her within minutes, particularly as he set about correcting the problems he had the power to fix through careful observation and stone-cold reason. Just where that left him in comparison to herself was even more baffling; despite the language barrier he was not stupid, despite the lack of supernatural powers he was still knowledgeable, and despite being a mere mortal just like her, he outpaced her and outgunned her with her own peoples' technology.

Even without being able to read a single thing on the tablet he'd brought with them for the preflight, he'd made himself far more useful than she had.

Now he was about to continue the trend, eyeing the fallen hulk across the valley from the curved, angular cockpit glass as he fidgeted with the seat, experimenting with a variety of positions that left him in different flavours of cramped. She hadn't the first clue as to how to fly the ship, particularly in its current, wounded condition. All she could do was sit in her seat, pray that he knew what he was doing, and hold on.

The Engineer cast her a brief glance as he reached down into the bag she'd brought upstairs with one hand, the other idly gripping the bruise on the back of his head where it'd met the ceiling minutes earlier; plucking the pad of paper and one of several pens free, he set about writing a note as she fished the tablet from the clutter that had made its way in there.

_You'll need to help me translate the controls._

She had assumed as much. Perhaps she wouldn't be _completely_ useless.

Those controls, she quickly noticed, were a plethora of colourful, illuminated digital readouts sprawled across the glossy black surface of the dashboard, stretching the length of the cockpit and forming a vaguely concave, scooped shape as it followed the natural arc of an arm's rotation about the shoulder. Hoping they weren't easily movable from their current locations, she set about cobbling together what little sense she could make of them in the ancient language at her disposal. _Hopefully he's clever enough to read between the lines. He's got to be_.

Methodology quickly fell into place, with Shaw identifying each control by name, putting it to words in Sumerian, handing the pad to Za'il, and watching as he squinted at the otherworldly, awkward descriptions on offer before penning a more sane definition in his own language, tearing the native words from the page, and placing them over the display in question. She found herself silently grateful for her brief but frantic bout of hoarding earlier as she found a roll of cellulose tape amongst the clutter in the bag, demonstrating her brush with genius to the Engineer as she tore off a section with her teeth and stuck one of his translations to the console above its respective control.

The delighted gasp that had escaped him as he realised what the tape was for warmed her from head to toe, and she wasn't quite convinced it was exclusively due to the burgeoning pride deep in her chest. He'd announced something brief but enthusiastic in his own language, flashing her a grin before plucking the tape from the console and hurriedly setting about sticking the other translations to their controls. She couldn't help but laugh as he rushed straight into his first experience with getting a little _too much_ of the tape in his mouth when trying to cut a piece off. Even in watching someone else doing it, she could taste the blasted stuff. If anything, it was a Human rite of passage, complete with trying to wipe the evidence off against the back of a hand.

 _Whoever finds this lifeboat in the future is going to have a field day,_ she realised with a grin as the console quickly evolved into a patchwork of neatly torn paper, littered with words from nowhere even remotely near the technology's planet of origin. People just like her, she realised, would likely stumble upon it and be left utterly stumped as to how this very situation must have arisen. The burns in the floor by the ruined infirmary would raise further questions, and the scrawls scattered throughout the main room would probably answer at least a handful of them – and likely raising far more.

Finally, as she handed him the translation for the last remaining unmarked dial, Za'il blew a heavy sigh, then murmured something in his own language. It didn't take a lot of imagination to fill the gaps, particularly as his long, translucent fingers began poking and sliding at the freshly-labelled controls. Section by section the central display, a top-down wireframe of the lifeboat itself, lit up green as systems came online, powered up, and prepared themselves for flight. Try as she might, she struggled to follow the procedure; she hoped he wasn't just guessing, as she would have.

Atmospheric thrusters began to register on the diagram, slowly fading to green with a few educated prods at their respective controls. Four along the base of the ship glowed brightly as their port- and starboard-mounted nacelle familiars pulsated to life one after another; only three eventually took on any colour. The rear-most port nacelle eventually blipped out of existence.

Chasing respective alerts across the console as a deep, audible hum flooded the cockpit, the Engineer remained the picture of calm composure despite fingers staggering from control to hesitant control, dark eyes darting rapidly across the illuminated expanse. Perhaps it was all theory, she realised. Getting a ship into orbit couldn't be _too_ different between cultures, given there were surely only so many configurations that would make faster-than-light travel possible, and possessing such technological prowess in the first place must rule out many of the unknowns.

One of the hull-mounted thrusters on the display faded to orange. A soft _beep_ followed it.

That measured calm faltered as Za'il pointed at the errors that had appeared alongside the damaged engine. Though she didn't understand any of the words he said, it was clear as day what he was asking. Grabbing the tablet and balancing the pad against one thigh, she hurriedly sought a translation that would do the errors justice.

_Fuel line C inoperable.  
Heat shield damaged._

_Power limited to 30%._

He scowled, chewing on his lower lip as his gaze darted between the translation, the ship's wireframe display, and the thruster controls. After a few clumsy attempts to access functionality that clearly wasn't there, he plucked the pen from the console with a deepening scowl and penned a message.

Translating brought extra challenges with the current context, given the Sumerian culture's distinct lack of starships, and the fact that neither of them had thought to tape all _three_ languages on the controls. However, between educated contextual guesswork and mad shuffling between the notes they'd taken prior to tearing pages to ribbons, she managed.

_We need to balance the thrusters, two are damaged. Please help me find the individual thruster controls._

"Uh," she began nervously, eyes flitting from dial to dial. "Individual thrusters." Drawing a breath, she touched the console displaying the directional controls and thrust, quickly thumbing through the menu alongside it. Met with a plethora of numbers and apparent settings that meant nothing to her, she recoiled as if burnt, mouthing another _um_. "That's not it."

 _Where are the bloody things,_ she fumed frantically as she tapped at the next gauge down. _This is why people spend years training for this crap. I'm an Archaeologist, not a pilot!_

After several more false starts, a button alongside the main atmospheric thruster control triggered an empty space to life; there, clear as day, was a wireframe illustration of exactly what they were looking for. Barely letting her remove her hand before he had his own upon it, Za'il murmured something that sounded as though it was in the affirmative, and swiftly unlocked the display's secrets. A gentle swipe brought up a coloured bar alongside all four lower engines and the three functioning nacelles; glowing an angry red and a standing third of the height of the others, the damaged hull-mounted engine's readout stood out immediately. A large, pale index finger pressed against its twin to the right, sliding the bar downward.

With further pointed fiddling between the seven displayed engines, Elizabeth finally saw what he was doing: the maximum and relative thrust outputs of each functioning engine were being balanced in relation to each other, evenly distributing power across the board as closely as he could.

He quietly murmured something else as his fingers moved on, sliding from one display to the next; he appeared to be checking off items from a mental list, finding each corresponding control after a moment of hunting. From what little she knew of flying _anything_ , she could only presume he had mapped hard-wired theory to alien context. He seemed confident enough. Perhaps it was pantomime for her sake.

_Don't think about that!_

A little louder, undeniably affirmative, he announced something to her – then remembered the language barrier as he trailed off, instead snatching the pen off the console and scribbling in a spare space on the pad.

_Are you ready?_

She nodded, shifting in her seat, gripping the bolster with both hands as firmly as she was pinching her bottom lip between her teeth.

With a few more well-guessed button presses, the vessel roared to life; jets of dust heaved upward and swirled around the hull, quickly spreading out into the vast landscape and tainting the view from the cockpit windows with dirty, powdery silica. Every inch of the ship shuddered as the whine from the engines quickly raised in pitch and increased in volume, beginning their inevitable fight with gravity. Shaw's eyes damn-near rolled from her skull as they darted between the console, the seething mass of dust outside, and the Engineer's translucent features, as stony as she'd ever seen them.

She had been so certain the vessel would never fly again. With an enormous rush of air that clawed at her eardrums, it did exactly that; lurching from its perch on the rocky terrain, it heaved her against her seat for several terrifying moments before hanging several metres above the ground as huge white fingers fought to keep it from listing to the port side.

It was _actually flying_.

The dust began to dissipate as they gained altitude, clearing enough that the landscape beyond slowly became visible once more. Hovering no more than twenty metres above the battered rocks it had sat upon for days, the lifeboat appeared to oscillate between listing to the port side briefly, then rotating about its axis as the Engineer fought to correct the movement.

A scowl had formed across his previously calm features. _Realistically, it has no business being airborne with so few engines_ , she realised. _This is going to be a bumpy ride._

After a few failed attempts to get the ship moving, he finally found the controls he was after; the tell-tale mechanical _whirr_ of the forward nacelles rotating in their housings heralded a change in movement as they lurched forward. Nose dipped, the vessel slowly, awkwardly swung about and began its wobbly, unsure sojourn toward the immense horseshoe dominating the valley.

Her stomach churned as the constant battle against the failed, malfunctioning engines left the ship's movement in a constant state of flux. The second half of their plan may need revision, she realised; it would be a long, precarious journey with the lifeboat in this state. Perhaps it would be safer to walk – even if it took all day.

The shrill cry of an alarm left both snapping their attention toward the centre of the console. "Great," Shaw mouthed as she immediately spotted its source; the damaged thruster on the vessel's belly blinked red, spewing a singular, unambiguous warning.

"It's overheating," she all but shouted, scrambling for the tablet and pad that had both shifted in the launch. "How do you say 'overheating' in Sumerian, damnit!"

Before she had a chance to translate, he had already begun shutting the engine down and compensating for its loss; it had faded from red to a blackened husk on the display by the time she'd managed to pen the word 'hot'. He'd offered a grim nod before returning to manhandling the swaying vessel.

Dust swirled about them as the lifeboat lost altitude. With the crashed Engineer ship almost upon them, Shaw's gaze once again darted between the landscape outside and the rather busy pilot; she noted the position of his right hand on the console, lingering over thruster control after dragging gently downward on the output panel. An intentional loss of altitude, then. _No less anxiety-inducing_ , she mused. _I'd be panicking far less if I could talk to him!_

Or would she? A constant barrage of questions probably wouldn't go down well.

At last, at long last, the ailing vessel came upon the shadow of the mighty fallen starship, slipping into the darkness in a plume of dust and debris as the Engineer slowly, painfully eased it toward the clearest patch he could find. Rotating on its axis, the lifeboat lurched to port, then starboard, as he compensated; a tell-tale _crash_ of glass from downstairs echoed up the stairs. Sunlight flooded the cockpit once more as the ship finally yielded, turning about with some semblance of control, sinking toward the rocky terrain below.

A heavy _thud_ resounded through the ship as Shaw was jolted off her seat; a second threw her back into it. Gripping the bolsters as though they were a life raft, she resisted the bucking motion that threatened to throw her clear of the seat entirely. Try as she might, she couldn't tune out the deep, metallic groaning and clanking from below; with so few engines available to control the vessel's course, setting it back down had proven to be just as precarious, with the ship briefly bouncing against its landing gear. But it had done it, hadn't it?

The whine of the engines died down as they throttled back, and the litany of warnings cluttering the centre console gradually faded. For the first time in several minutes – but what felt like hours – she could hear herself breathe again as a stillness pervaded the cockpit.

Somehow, the ruined ship had flown. She could still scarcely believe it.

She let slip a soft laugh as, oblivious, the Engineer busied himself shutting down systems in a haphazard flurry of hands. Against all odds, something had finally gone in some semblance of _right_ ; having a somewhat functional ship to cart them from the crashed ship to those lying idle in their respective hangars had drastically improved the chances of their plan seeing success, removing travel time as an issue and reducing their risk of encountering less-than-savoury locals enroute.

As his hands stilled against the console, its various diagrams and dials fading to lifeless wireframes and empty bezels, Za'il released a huge, relieved sigh. Offering a grin as his gaze grazed hers, she busied herself packing up the clutter strewn throughout the cockpit, packing it into the bag between them and shuffling out of her seat and back down the stairs so she didn't end up with a concussion as he tried to exit his own.

Just as she'd expected, the main room downstairs was now in somewhat of a state of disarray. They needn't have bothered placing all the books back on the bookshelf, because half of them had once again been detonated across the floor, with at least three large bottles above the bar following suit in an explosion of glass shrapnel. The air near the bar, whilst overwhelmingly alcoholic, reminded her of smoke and wood, dragging up images of leather, fireplaces and cosy cabins in the furthest vestiges of her mind. She shuddered to think what those broken bottles had contained, and struggled with the idea that she wouldn't need to clean the several litres of spilled liquid from the floor, given they weren't far from abandoning the vessel.

Slow, heavy footsteps dragged her from her reverie. Behind her, the Engineer had emerged, hunched and awkward, from the narrow stairwell with somewhat of an intent expression across his features; pausing to stretch, his elbows grazed the ceiling as he thrust his arms over his head and leaned backward. A whisper of a groan escaped him as several vertebrae in his spine released a loud, bassy _pop_ in the process – several more in his neck did the same as he rolled his head back and forth. While it had always lingered in her consciousness just how inadequate the lifeboat's proportions were for someone of Za'il's height, having watched him struggle as he interacted with a plethora of Human-sized objects, structures and designs, she hadn't quite considered how incredibly uncomfortable it might have been all this time. Just how _patient_ had this creature been over the past few days?

Expelling a thoughtful breath, he offered her a shallow twitch of a nod before reaching past her, collecting a glass from the other side of the bar and filling it with water. The shattered mess smeared across the floor caught his eye as he leaned over; he regarded it with an unamused scowl before draining the glass, but opted to ignore it as he crouched to fish the pad, pens and tablet from the bag still slung over her shoulder, and instead meandered over to the couches and sunk down onto the one cushion that hadn't been ejected from the base during their wild flight.

Casting the mess one last glance, she eventually followed suit after retrieving, at random, an undamaged bottle of Gewürztraminer from a low-lying wine rack and a couple of suitable glasses. The couches, at least, came to rights with little more than throwing the cushions back into place and securing them with a gentle nudge; with some semblance of sanity clawed back within the room, she cracked the bottle open as she curled up on the couch and poured perhaps the first restrained, conservative helping into each glass that this train wreck of a voyage had seen so far.

Meanwhile, Za'il had extracted two somewhat tidily-composed lists from the back of the pad of paper, lining them up alongside each other and the comparatively insane mess of three scribbled languages that had formed them. Several items on the left-most list, written in a language she knew to be his own simply because she couldn't make heads or tails of it, had been scrubbed out with heavy pen strokes. He'd opted, apparently, for a simple line through items on the far messier page, leaving them perfectly legible – or, as legible as they could be with either of their childlike, unfamiliar scratchings.

He cast her the the faintest quirk of the lips as he did the same to a singular item on the third list before handing it to her. This one, of course, was written by her, in English; _See if the lifeboat still flies_. She returned the grin in spades.

His attention had fallen back to the haphazard mess of languages before him, poking at the hastily-scribbled arrows and brackets looping several items together with the nib of his pen. This, she recalled, had been a point of contention; with lists of items to collect and tasks to complete, they had done their best to forge some kind of timeline in which to achieve it all. As could be expected, he had seemed in an inordinate rush to simply _get going_ , initially planning on gaining access to the first hangar later today after spending a fair chunk of time on board the crashed vessel collecting supplies and leveraging the starship's vastly more powerful scanning equipment to get a final, accurate topography of the tunnels and what lurked within them. Shaw, on the other hand, had every intention of setting about their final escape rested, fed, armed and in full sunlight.

As much as it had clearly irritated him at the time, he had eventually conceded she was right; there was no pressing need for a huge rush, and pushing her comparatively tiny body to keep up with his in a race against the afternoon sun would end in tears. There had been a softness in that concession, something unreadable in his dark eyes that haunted her even now. It wasn't like she could simply ask him, either; writing anything personal in their intermediary language had seemed to fall foul of its mark without fail, and by this point, she'd long since decided she preferred to _just get along with him_ in lieu of risking hubris in the name of answers.

If anything, her respect for him and swelled during the process. With the full knowledge that an empty warship awaited him, he could easily have ditched his Human baggage and set sail the moment they had disagreed on a timeframe for action; he had in fact done the opposite, pursing his lips thin with forced patience as they painfully negotiated to the point of cautious agreement, condensing her getaway to the point of rushing, but slowing him down by an entire day. The fact that every rising bubble of frustration about him had dissipated into self-flagellating resignation when his eyes drifted back to the purple marks staining her biceps was not lost on her. She hoped he was simply reminding himself of her comparative fragility and thinking accordingly.

Leaving no room for misinterpretation, she had etched sun and moon symbols – albeit altering the latter to resemble the huge, ringed gas giant that hung in the sky for at least part of the night when it dawned on her that they were _on_ the moon, so to speak – alongside the growing list of tasks to complete cluttering that busy, messy scratchpad of a page. At almost exactly the same time, he had leaned across to group them by day and night in a series of square brackets. She fondly recalled the outburst of laughter from both of them that had resulted from that joint stroke of genius.

Having paused in his intense scrutiny of the pages littering the coffee table, the Engineer had turned his attention toward one of the two glasses of pale drink sitting opposite him. Apparently patently aware of how absurdly thin the glass was, of its preposterously narrow, delicate stalk, he seemed unwilling to lift it much higher than a foot off the table, instead leaning over it to smell its contents. She'd all but forgotten about it herself, as she'd become lost in thought; she reached across the table for her own glass, gently cupping it in one hand and raising it to her nose.

She wasn't quite sure _what_ to make of it as she took a sip, eyes widening as flavour after flavour exploded across her tongue before fizzling out with a _pop_ what was wholly inappropriate for wine. Whatever the stuff was, there was no denying it was savagely complex – too complex for her tastebuds, though she had to confess the aftertaste left her wanting more. It was probably expensive, as well. She had half a mind to guzzle it as though it came from a cardboard cask just to spite Weyland.

Doing so would probably put her out of commission for the second item on her list, however: _Use the scanners on the crashed ship._

A similar expression of wide-eyed surprise had spread across Za'il's face as he mirrored her movements, clearly not sure what to make of whatever it was he'd put in his mouth; swallowing hard, he raised the glass higher and squinted at what remained of the contents for a drawn-out, baffled moment. After another cursory sniff, he simply placed it back on the table.

With the view out the window now consumed by the smoky, grey bulk of the enormous ship outside, there was no easy way to guess the time at a glance; the afternoon had churned on in their flurry of activity, and it was likely that they only had a few hours of sunlight left, if that. She didn't fancy meandering about on the surface after nightfall, never being quite sure of what lurked in the shadows.

A long, white finger probed at the list before her, gently tapping at the item directly below the first, scratched-out line. Having already pushed himself to his feet, the Engineer wasted little time in collecting equipment that had toppled from their neatly-stacked piles and bounced across the floor during their short but eventful flight. After clambering into his awaiting armour and fishing a large weapon-like device she didn't care to identify from one of the crates by the airlock, he cast her an impatient, expectant look as he plopped a blue Human-sized suit and helmet on the crate's lid.

 _May as well get on with it,_ she thought as she clambered from the couch. _The sooner this is over and done with, the better._

Normally one wasn't supposed to wear an awful lot of clothing under a Weyland Corp standard-issue spacesuit, but at this point, cramming her shorts and singlet into its skin-tight confines would have to do. She certainly wasn't going to strip them with the Engineer standing by the airlock, fiddling with his helmet as he waited for her. It did, however, become evident why things were done as they were as she fought with the zipper and its predilection for catching the clothing underneath, then with the wrinkles of fabric that almost immediately began chewing at her skin.

_Whatever. This will do. Get on with it!_

Taking one last glance at her list, she set about preparing for their departure. While his had been long, covering multiple tasks whilst aboard his vessel, hers had consisted of just one.

_Retrieve David._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which not a whole lot happens, because writing this chapter was literal agony.
> 
> Sorry this took so long to get here. I've been genuinely struggling with this section of the story, and I'm gagging to move onto the next, but for the sake of pace and background, their messy little flight needed to happen.
> 
> I might re-write this one yet, it feels a lit stilted and distant for my liking. I may even merge it with the next one coming, condense it a bit and give it a bit more context - it deserves to be part of a monster of a chapter, but some of the places I post it have chapter length limits and it'll need to be split anyway. Argh.
> 
> Generally I try to post more often than this, but this mere 5000 damn near killed me.
> 
> ALSO. I recently came upon a significant conundrum with this story. I'd like your feedback, dear readers.
> 
> So, in a nutshell, Alien: Covenant is coming out soon and this throws open an enormous can of worms. To keep this canon, I'm likely going to need to rewrite parts of it. Potentially huge parts of it. Does anyone know with this series anyway? Regardless, I'm going to try and finish this story before then, and start working on the sequel in a vague enough way that I can backtrack if necessary (ie: focus on everyone else!). Yay.
> 
> The alternative that struck me, as I plan what I want these two to get up to, is just not restricting myself to the source material and growing it the hell away from this series. I'm feeling more and more restricted by existing material, and it's inhibiting growth. Naturally this means 1) re-characterising Elizabeth, though not significantly, and 2) addressing the Engineer look of Za'il. Thankfully he's a unique character, just borrowing the look of the movie, but Elizabeth would need an overhaul.
> 
> This would also mean a whole lot of work establishing the how and the why they got to the point of being on this chunk of rock.
> 
> I'm game for busting my arse, to be honest, and I would probably actually finish the fanfiction form too if I diversified.
> 
> Yay, nay? Overthinking?


	11. Unspeakable Acts

Standing in the shadows of another person had, for the most part, been a fairly accurate description of Elizabeth's life to date. Many, many hours had been sunk into ruminating on her perpetual right-hand status, whether it was the unfortunate family extra in the wake of her parents' respective deaths, damn-near-permanent second-best throughout her experience in the field, or simply _Charlie's Wife_. No matter how much effort she put into something, she had almost always found herself playing second fiddle to someone else.

Though the doomed _Prometheus_ mission had all the promise of being different, given these were _her_ theories and _her_ findings that had landed them here – oh, and how _swimmingly_ that had gone! – she had, predictably, found herself being overshadowed once again by Charlie, then by David, left as the stuffy voice of reason as everyone else set about adventuring, sticking their fingers where they didn't belong, and making almost every decision throughout the mission despite her musings to the contrary. The few decisions she _had_ made seemed to end in pain of some variety, such was the degree to which she had gone into this woefully underprepared.

Idly, quietly, she had wondered whether this was all fate, or whether she had a hand in it at all. There was always talk of controlling one's destiny, being the master of one's own fate, but she remained unconvinced – especially in light of recent events. She _had_ , for all intents and purposes, thrown herself at this mission with all of her tiny might, and _still_ been denied agency. It was as though she was destined to either remain in the shadows or dice with death.

Right now, quite literally, she was doing exactly the former. Even with the death of Charlie and the incapacitation of David, she was not the one calling the shots. Even as the only Human left alive on this piece of rock, she was relegated to follower. It would have been a lie to say it didn't bother her, but what choice was there? With the sun hanging heavy in the afternoon sky, rather than squint in the glare its golden rays as it bounced off the imperfections in her helmet, she had opted to stand in the huge shadow Za'il cast as he attempted, for a third time, to gain access to the crashed Engineer ship via the hidden pinpad that apparently refused to cooperate. Doing so had, despite its immediate practicalities, thrown her mind into the sort of self-deprecating, overthinking mode she preferred to avoid if at all possible; she especially preferred to avoid it when the trigger for it was _still currently happening_.

And yet, here they were. Little more than Human baggage, she had ample time to muse her dancing to the beat of the Engineer's drum.

An irritated sigh from beneath the elephantine mask above her finally stole her from her spiral of thoughts. Energetically shaking his head with raised, questioning hands, Za'il had apparently given up on using logic to gain access and had resorted to shouting at the airlock instead.

What a _fantastic_ day this had turned out to be.

For a moment, she found herself hoping they would turn around and return to the lifeboat for a much-needed and much-deserved evening of rest. It was certainly impossible to know what he was thinking as he stared down at her from above, his bizarre helmet completely obscuring his face and rendering him absolutely unreadable. It occurred to her that, in the absence of spoken language, she had been projecting Human emotions onto his numerous facial expressions and hoping they stuck; without even that at her disposal, she couldn't quite swallow the welling of cold, roiling fear in the pit of her stomach – the very same fear that had stalked her from the moment she first laid eyes on him, the fear she thought she'd almost successfully shaken.

Perhaps she simply wasn't evolved enough a Human to be interacting with alien life forms, she reasoned. It had been painfully evident over the past week that she certainly had no business being out here, and couldn't fathom why she thought she should be in the first place. For the billions of people occupying the distant blue planet, for the hundreds of thousands of whom were directly involved in the art of Space, the study of things beyond the confines of Earth, it seemed laughable that an _Archaeologist_ of all things was to lead the first major expedition in history bound for a planet supposedly teeming with life.

The Engineer got halfway through saying something to her in the most measured, even tone he could muster before trailing off with a huff, shaking his head again, and instead motioning for her to follow him as he turned to march alongside the starboard arm of the fallen vessel toward the stern.

He was grumpy, that much she could discern; if not for his stubborn march into the wind, shoulders squared and tense as he sped off ahead without her, his balled fists gave it away. His was the gait of a determined man, urgent but lacking any palpable arrogance about it, entirely fixated ahead and in an inordinate hurry to reach his target. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed he was rightfully irritated; perhaps grumpy was the wrong word.

Lingering somewhere between a trot and the cusp of a jog, Shaw found herself all but skittering after the immense creature as he continued to pull distance between the two of them. If it weren't for the pack slung over both shoulders, stuffed with equipment for the task ahead, she'd have considered simply turning back and heading for the couch aboard the lifeboat. He was still in an enormous rush and unamused by the setbacks so far, and having a Human tailing him was simply slowing him down. Perhaps it was better if she just–

The Engineer skidded to a halt without warning, turning on a heel as he looked back over his shoulder at her. With the language barrier alive and well, and being unable to read his face in lieu of comprehensible words, she was left trying to pick apart what body language showed through his heavy, intricate armour. There was the slightest hint of a slump as he turned to face her, arms hanging patiently – patiently? – by his side as she broke into a jog to catch up.

Tilting his head to the side as she reached him, by now puffing from running and able to smell her own sweat within the confines of the suit and helmet, he stole a moment to regard her from above before setting off again at a far more reasonable pace.

It struck her that whenever she had begun spinning into a vortex of self-deprecation, pre-planning an act of rejection or violence from him, he managed to surprise her with an uncharacteristically gentle or thoughtful gesture – just as he seemed to jolt her with an unpredictable outburst whenever she thought she had begun to understand him. _Not exactly the most healthy of relationships, is it? Amazing what one will do to just bloody survive._

Wherever it was she was being led, she'd hoped _this_ wasn't going to be it. He had stopped clear of any entrances along the hull, instead pausing below the overhang of the rear of the vessel quite a number of metres above, staring up at the looming lip directly above with the sort of intent she knew could only mean one thing.

Two huge hands leaning over her and wrestling with her pack confirmed her suspicions; as if this trip hadn't been action-packed and intrepid enough, they were now going full _Indiana Jones_ and making the sort of entrance reserved for the fodder of movies. The repeated _clank_ of mountaineering equipment being pulled free and tossed onto the ground left her grinding her teeth. _Ain't no rest for the wicked, Doctor. Aren't you glad you did that godforsaken abseiling course a decade ago?_

He cast her another drawn glance before handing her one of the harnesses and ascenders with noticeably less haste than he'd applied in the last few minutes. As she set about equipping herself, the wondered if her own tense, apprehensive facial expression had given her away; he certainly had the advantage of being able to _actually see her_ with her clear helmet.

In the next breath, she found herself learning a new word in his language; the short, sharp syllable shouted at her was clearly a warning of some kind, and having looked upward as he darted aside, she'd immediately narrowed the possible meanings down. The clawed hook at the end of the rope he'd thrown had bounced off its intended target and come straight back down, landing right where she'd a moment earlier stood and rebounding against solid stone with a resounding _clang_.

Another familiar word followed – a meek apology, followed by a frustrated huff.

"They have a bit of a personality on them," she smirked knowingly, reflecting on a dozen similar failed attempts of her own over the years. After all, not every dig was in an easy-to-access, open pit; more than once she'd found herself armed with this equipment day after day, climbing for a significant portion of each day to access the most difficult-to-find ruins. "Let's see if I remember how it's done."

Ejecting the hooked end after a determined spin, Elizabeth seemed to have a little more luck than her enormous companion; with a _tink_ and a familiar _scrape_ , the hook snatched at the surface above and found purchase as the rest of the equipment deployed and latched on. It wasn't often that she found herself scaling rocks like this, but, for once, she was glad she had; she gave the rope a quick tug, then, as it stayed put as intended, she dragged the rest of her weight against it to make sure it wasn't going to drop her on her arse the moment she was high enough for a fall to do damage.

The Engineer murmured something quietly, offered a nod, and adjusted his throw to something far more like hers – with apparently more success, as was immediately evident as the device deployed alongside Shaw's.

Wasting little time, she set about hauling herself up the blasted rope and getting this expedition over and done with.

It was hardly surprising that he'd made quicker progress than her, longer and stronger limbs notwithstanding. Apparently he'd expected the same, having pulled himself up and over the ledge with swift, military form before poking his head back over it to see where she was – evidently he wasn't expecting her to be right behind him, because she could have sworn she heard a short gasp as he recoiled, their helmets mere inches from touching as he'd peered over.

Offering a hand as she reached the edge, he grasped her arm and hoisted her upward as if she weighed nothing. At this point she wasn't going to turn down a helping hand; the extra weight of the pack had left her gasping.

Another airlock sat at the end of a short corridor leading into the vessel; this one, much to her relief, yielded on the first try and hissed open. Muttering something that sounded distinctly like it contained some of the profanity he'd spewed on several occasions to date, Za'il stepped inside and waited for her to follow suit as he held one gloved hand over the door jamb, then set about marching down the corridor and along a route etched into hard-wired memory.

A cold shiver ran down her spine as her eyes traced the immense arches of dark ribs lining the interior of the vessel. Staying aboard the lifeboat for the last few days had, she realised, done wonders for her state of mind; the familiar, quantifiably _Human_ design of the vessel was a salve for the torment of the days prior, spent picking around indescribably alien surroundings that had quickly become one with absolute terror and only gotten worse from there. This place, too, had immediately become synonymous with doom. Certainly the cargo hold was filled with it, for reasons still a horrifying mystery. Asking him about it couldn't end well, as much as she still wanted her answers.

The Bridge, too, was an altar to death in a far more literal sense. As Za'il paced ahead, clearly occupied with what remained of the navigation array, she froze in place when a glint of blue and orange flickered in the corner of the room below one of the malfunctioning, sparking lights. Limp, swollen, the three bloated corpses heaped against the wall had clearly been dead for several days. This was _not_ what she wanted to see when coming here–

An almighty exclamation of disgust echoed about the walls; gasping as she turned on a heel, she quickly noted that the Engineer had his removed his helmet – and had promptly thrown it on the ground as he clamped both hands over his nose and mouth. More profanity followed, along with a wet-sounding, violent retch that damn-near left him doubled over.

 _That'll happen when you leave dead bodies on your Bridge,_ she mused, unable to shake the bitter expression that clawed at her features. _Maybe less wholesale murder next time, if you don't like the smell._

Pulling a distinctly upset grimace, the Engineer swallowed hard and set about what he was doing, one hand remaining clamped over his nose and mouth. Pushing aside a mass of exposed cables, he clambered up the ruined navigation array and busied himself with a plethora of buttons.

With plenty of reason to keep her helmet on this time, Shaw set about searching for the _other_ remains strewn about the place. The place where David's body had fallen was smeared with thick, white muck in a significant enough quantity that if he were Human, she mused, he would surely have bled to death. The far edge of the spattered puddle of ooze had been smeared off toward the edge of the room, away from the decomposing bodies. Perhaps at least his body was down there...

A blast of white and pale cyan enveloped her as she set about looking for the head; a shriek escaped her amongst the blinding, swirling haze of light. Behind her came the _thud_ of two boots hitting the ground – she could barely make out the immense figure pacing across the room amongst the flurry of holographic worlds orbiting shimmering stars etched in beads of light, with only the gleam of the top of his head visible above the hubris of searing colour.

He must have noticed her fly-catching gawp; despite the horrific smell sullying the air, he offered a faint quirk of a grin as he reached into the swirling mass, pinching one of the floating planets with the tips of his fingers and dragging it down toward her. Cork-like, it bobbed as if floating on water as he released it, hovering a few inches from her nose as it resumed its languid rotation about its axis. Behind her, the Engineer gently batted another aside as he silently sank down into the Captain's chair.

Mouth still agape, she raised her own hand to gently paw at the orb; it had the same faint tingle about it as the holos from the projector he'd brought aboard the lifeboat, albeit far more noticeable given the vast scale of them and, she imagined, the far more powerful equipment aboard the vessel.

She twisted and turned the grapefruit-sized planet in her grasp, studying the rich features etched into its surface. At first it appeared to simply be white continents against cyan oceans, but as her eyes adjusted to its intense glow, the faint ridges of mountain ranges and canyons crawling across the numerous land masses became far easier to spot. The continents themselves quickly followed as her vision began to discern their edges. South America, Australia, Africa...it didn't take long at all to recognise it.

Shooting the Engineer a quizzical look over her shoulder, she cradled the tiny Earth between both hands as she clutched it close to her chest. She _knew_ he was headed for it the moment this entire endless debacle launched into full swing, and she _knew_ his people had planned a strike against them two millennia before they had awoken him, but there was something so incredibly undeniable, so _absolute_ , about him identifying the planet amongst the hundreds of other holographic words floating around them and handing it to her.

The look he returned was probably intended to be reassuring, she reasoned, when she could find only warmth, no malice, in his eyes. His gaze lingered for a few seconds before shifting back to the console before him, leaving her to become consumed by the tiny Earth between her fingers.

Having become _intimately familiar_ with the perils of assumption in the past few days, she was more than a little reluctant to resort to it at this point – however, it felt like the slick, understated gesture was almost a concession of some sort. It had been so casually executed, as if it wasn't intended to mean much, and yet…

Was he bequeathing the planet back to her as some sort of admission? Was he acknowledging a catastrophic misjudgement of her people, or a change of plan? Was he handing back control of the situation, or merely suggesting the planet was no longer a target?

Was she gratuitously over-thinking the gesture? Perhaps he was simply acknowledging where she came from.

She wouldn't have to agonise over it for long. With an anticlimactic _bzz_ , the entire display – including Earth – blinked out of existence, leaving her overtaxed vision stumbling about the cavernous Bridge in the dark; moments later, a far smaller, dimmer hologram took its place in the very centre of the room, its increasingly familiar tunnels and towers gradually snaking their way outward from the fallen vessel's present position. This, she quickly recognised, must be the in-depth scan he had mentioned earlier.

Indeed, this holo was vastly more detailed than the last; these tunnels had doors and airlocks, their adjoining rooms filled with fixtures. Docked ships were more than mere outlines, and as the scan progressed, a few even began to show internal systems in fractured smatterings, tiny details slowly crawling outward in glowing, ant-like trails. And, troublingly, the coloured blips occupying many of the corridors no longer seemed round.

Shaw's eyes remained welded to one of the greenish blobs closest to her, lingering in a hallway at the farthest reaches of the third tower as quiet footfalls approached from behind. The Engineer crouched alongside her, out of arm's reach, pointedly holding his breath as he consciously kept his breathing shallow. The smell in the room must be obscene, she reasoned.

Grasping the illustrated corridor closest to them with the fingers of both hands, he drew the pinched points apart to enlarge the holo before them. The blip sitting to its far wall took shape as he enlarged the display again, with intricate contortions of sinew and structure forming across its surface; its unrecognisable shape reminded her of a fossil, huddled in a confusing mass of limbs and spines as if immortalised in amber.

After a moment the scanners made another pass, fleshing out detail throughout the hologram with a nearly imperceptible ripple of motion. The green _thing_ took on a more intricate form, the straps of sinew becoming arms and legs distorted into the most horrifying of contortions. The elongated, smooth mass along the top of the nest of limbs must have been the creature's head – it looked no different to the sketch Za'il had made days earlier. Those details must have been burned into his brain, much as a mere glance had seared them into her own.

A mighty, visceral shudder wracked the Engineer's body from head to toe as his fingers released the hologram. At a glance, his expression had grown grim. She was certain it wasn't just because of the stench of death permeating the atmosphere.

Swallowing hard, he grasped at the display as he stood, quickly shrinking it back down to a size that the room could contain. As he tweaked it to and fro, studying its outer reaches as data continued to flesh it out with fine detail, Shaw decided that one look was more than enough. There was _no way_ she wanted to see these creatures in the flesh, and for the time being, she refused to acknowledge that they would likely run headlong into the lone cyan blip lingering in the tunnel between the two ships that awaited them at the far end of the complex. Leaving the Engineer to study the map alone, she slunk away to continue looking for pieces of android.

As much as she didn't want to be anywhere near the swollen corpses heaped away from the navigation array, she needed to ensure there wasn't a decapitated body beneath them. With the way they were stacked, she was fairly certain they had fallen there during the crash rather than intentionally discarded; the tangle of limbs was too haphazard, too arbitrary. There were only enough for three bodies, too – it was safe to assume she wouldn't need to check beneath them.

The tendrils of debris strewn below the centre of the Bridge made for extra hazards as she searched. Some of the conduits hanging from smashed panels appeared to be wiring, barely recognisable in their alienness; one emitted a brief spark of electricity when she inadvertently disturbed nearby clutter. Another, torn from the roof and dangling limply by the far wall, occasionally sparked and popped in a similar manner, unbidden. The sheer state of carnage on that side of the room simply screamed _hazard_ at her, and if David was over there, she could bet he would be in no state to–

Another burst of light from the sparking conduit illuminated a strap of orange on the far side of the Bridge. Two recognisably Human hands stretched up from the floor, barely peeking above the central ridge she was standing on and seemingly reaching toward something, toward nothing, perpetually frozen exactly where they'd ceased to animate. _There you are._

Resolving to collect him later, she quietly slunk back to the severed head gaping into the abyss behind her. His body was larger than hers and contained a Hell of a lot more heavy components; she would need help carting him back, especially if they were going to exit in the same fashion as they entered.

The head was lifeless, she noted as she rolled it to face upward. Eyes open, unseeing, his expression had been frozen in resigned thought. Perhaps this was the _uncanny valley_ people spoke of when ruminating the ever-decreasing gap between Human and not-quite-Human; David was so incredibly realistic to both the look and touch, but frozen in mid-thought as he was, he was neither a torpid corpse nor a living, breathing being. Something barely sapient within her was suddenly so mind-bendingly revolted, so primally upset, her hands jerked away from the synthetic skin as if burnt as she suppressed an unhappy groan.

The sound had not gone unnoticed. A loud gasp echoed about the Bridge over the scuffle of boots against metal as the Engineer scrambled to his feet, mouth agape in apparent horror as she snapped her attention toward the enormous being.

That horror didn't last long, quickly twisting into something far more familiar; her blood froze in her veins as he spat several angry, accusing words that reverberated against the walls and clawed at her eardrums. His voice was as deep as it was alien, louder than she'd ever heard it, black like his eyes as they narrowed to a furious squint.

She became aware that her hands were shaking as he scrutinised her, righteous fury contorting his features. His own were balled into fists by his sides. She'd forgotten to breathe; it snagged in her throat with a whimper as she stole a gasp.

With that, a torrent of rage exploded from the Engineer. Even if she could understand his language, she mightn't have understood a thing of what he shouted at her here, fumbling with words as he spat them, gesticulating wildly with both hands, pacing back and forth as he interrupted himself with an endless stream of consciousness, barely breaking for a breath.

Perhaps the worst of it, the last vestige of intelligent thought mused from the farthest reaches of her mind, was that he seemed to all but refuse to look at her. Immense gloved hands clawed at his head in apparent outrage before gesticulating violently in her direction, back and forth as he ranted on. Her ears rung, the furious shouting competing only with the hammering of her own heartbeat in her throat.

The demise of the head beneath her hands stained her vision, the android's decapitation playing over and over again before her as the creature shouted; her former crewmates' untimely ends followed, repeatedly, replaying every time her terrified eyes caught a glimpse of his face. As temperamental as he seemed to be, _that_ was the last time she had seen him nearly this angry. He'd been half as outraged back then and he'd torn them to pieces.

There was no doubt in her mind that this, this of all things, would be her final moments.

She didn't even know why.

She supposed it was only fair. Her need for answers had led seventeen people to their horrific, agonising, unfair deaths; it seemed only right she would be sent to her own with a million more questions, more than she could have answered if she'd lived, the most pressing of which would be her last.

At least one would be answered. How would she die? Would it be blunt force trauma like Weyland, Jackson and Ford? Would it be a crushed skull? Would it be from being flung against the walls of the Bridge? Would it be instant, or, in such a state of rage, would he drag it out, make her suffer for her unknown crime?

The Engineer stopped dead in the midst of his tirade, hunched over balled fists, mouth wide as he gasped for breath. Something in his expression changed, staining the rage that had gripped him with...with…

Every thought in her head screeched to a grinding halt as his glare tore her limb from limb. It wasn't _rage_ at all, was it? _No_...it was _mortal offense_. For all the distaste woven into his expression, she may as well have delivered the worst insult known to mankind then slapped him across the face. It was unmistakable; there was _hurt_ in his eyes. _Betrayal_.

He fractured the silence with another string of words, far quieter but no less accusational. Lips drawn thin, he drew a breath and turned on a heel to begin marching toward her. At that pace, he would cross the Bridge in seconds.

_Seconds left, Doctor, and you have no answers; well done._

Her breath hitched in her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut, head dipping as she awaited the end. _I guess this is how I leave this foetid rock, after all._

There was no sudden, violent contact; he did not grab her throat, nor did he shatter her helmet and crush her skull. He did not grab her suit and wrench her from her knelt, crumpled position on the deck, or thrust her across the room.

She felt a jolt as huge hands grabbed her backpack, tugging her a mere few inches forward as he ripped at the zipper. The metal complained at the force exerted against it and yielded; immediately there was rough fumbling against her back as he rifled through the pack's contents. One of the movements nudged her forward. Her helmet bumped his knee. _What on Earth is he doing?_

It was over as quickly as it started; after yanking something from the pack he turned and marched several paces away. Her ears still rang from the hubris earlier, barely able to hear his angry, ragged breaths over her own panicked gasps and thundering heart. Squeaking one eye open from her bowed, defeated hunch, she spotted him standing near the navigation array; a thousand emotions were etched into his face, lips drawn beneath a concrete scowl as he floundered with the tablet in frustrated swipes and jabs.

Before she had a chance to consider this newest turn of events, he stepped toward her again and shoved the tablet at her, screen-first.

Somehow he'd managed to force it to display just one word alongside its English translation.

_Abomination._

Once again she found herself lost for words. With all her preparation for imminent demise, she hadn't readied herself for another frantic to-and-fro with that blasted language game; she doubted she was even capable of figuring anything out in this state. Her hands were quaking against the tablet so hard she could barely read it.

What was the _abomination_ – was it her, was it something she said or did? How had he gone from calmly showing her results from the scan to outright _screaming_ at her in incandescent outrage? What had changed?

A glint of gold between her knees caught her eye as she groped at the device.

 _I'm inclined to agree,_ she mused blackly as she pressed her lips tight. _But I would call that an overreaction._

Hands still shaking too violently to be truly useful, she carefully slipped the pack from her shoulders to hunt for the pad of paper and a pen. Unsure if he was content to wait, she snatched it from the pack the moment she spotted it, immediately penning an apology from memory with her right as she fumbled for words on the tablet with her left. The weight of his glare clawed at her flesh. She wished she could acknowledge his patience, thank him for it; there were a million-and-one ways things could have gone, but this wasn't among any she could have projected.

The pen barely stayed in her grasp as she wrote. A constant drumbeat of mortality had woven itself into her psyche, once again returning into the perpetual wait for death that had clawed at her shadow for every moment aside from the last…

For how long had she found any semblance of peace? Had it been a mere day or two?

This was no time for this sort of distraction! Penning the last of her response, she offered the pad and pen to the Engineer. The obvious, visible rage had ebbed from him, but what remained was no better; he still seemed offended, disappointed. _Disgusted._

_I'm so sorry. I can't fly the ship alone. I need this._

Still tense, scrutinising the page through narrowed eyes, he sighed and shook his head. Once again testing the patience that seemed to show up at the most opportune of moments, he shot her an accusatory glare before mulling a response, then put it to paper with hasty, irritated pen strokes and tossed both back at her feet. Refusing to look at either her or the severed head before her, he turned on a heel, paced back toward the navigation array, then stopped dead and clawed at his face with both hands, unable to suppress a groan of unbridled frustration.

_You can't have these things. Don't your people know this? No good can come of this._

The Engineers had most likely experimented with such creations in the past, she figured; it was but one of infinite forms of life, of creation, and given the immense strides she imagined – couldn't imagine – they'd made, it made sense that they'd had some form of Android amongst them at some stage. And, given David's unpredictable nature throughout the _Prometheus_ expedition, given his bizarre behaviour and, frankly, _irrefutable untrustworthiness_ , it didn't take much to imagine the plethora of misfortunes that may have unfolded to leave his people, or even him personally, unhinged with contempt at the mere suggestion of such synthetic life.

_I'm not disagreeing with you, but I can't fly and I need his help. He is just a machine._

After a quick glance across the page, Za'il drew a heavy breath and exhaled hard, momentarily pressing his eyes closed before setting his gaze upon her once more. The distaste was still there, staining his features, but the rest was a mystery; once again she felt like a naughty child that had failed her parents, caught red-handed doing something stupid. Perhaps there was an element of truth to it – she, indirectly, on behalf of the Human race, had sinned before their creators, and their creators were angry. Disappointed. Had expected more of them, clearly.

His dark eyes darted between the page and the head by her knees, a thousand thoughts flickering before them as the pen lingered above the page. Confusion appeared to be vying for dominance over the plethora of other angry, upset emotions he was displaying, whipping words away from the tip of the pen as they formed. Finally he murmured something at her, his voice thin and bewildered, then sighed and shook his head as he filled the rest of the page with a note.

_The abomination could do untold damage. You should destroy it. I can teach you to fly, it's not hard._

She let out a heavy sigh as she finished translating the message, casting the inanimate head by her knees a glance before flipping to a fresh sheet where she succeeded in pressing the nib against it several times, embossing the page in a series of dots, and little else. She _knew_ the latter thought was a lie, a dirty, transparent lie; there would be nothing easy about flying a vessel like this, even ignoring the gaping chasm in her understanding of the process itself _and_ her non-existent familiarity with the technology. It was unlikely she could even _reach the controls_ , given their apparent overhead position at arm's reach – for an Engineer. Unless the smaller vessel had a vastly different setup, she was going nowhere without David.

There was also the not-inconsequential detail of her inability to speak any language other than English with useful fluency, and her overwhelming fragility compared to damn-near _everything else_ in the universe. As much as she distrusted the android, as much as she had already seen that the Engineer was _absolutely right_ in his brutal assessment of him, she would be too vulnerable without the protection of the larger, stronger artificial lifeform.

Not that his superior strength had done him any good in his first encounter with that particular Engineer, mind.

Still, she would be easy pickings out there in the wider galaxy. Any Human would, that much was screamingly obvious after the last calamitous week.

Unless, of course, she went with Za'il – wherever he was headed. It seemed he had different plans though, she realised, remembering him pointing out _two_ empty vessels. Besides, it would arguably be just as dangerous to hitch a ride with a being more than twice her size and a frightening, unpredictable temper. If the last few days were anything to judge by, she would be bald from stress by the time they arrived at any particular destination.

Even so, perhaps she could simply shut up, get back into learning mode, and shadow him back to the Engineer homeworld. If she could avoid pissing him off, he might even be patient enough to teach her his language, _actually_ teach her to fly the vessel, and teach her how to stop poking every single button that seemed to set him off on explosive diatribes. The fleeting windows of sanity they had experienced in transitioning from one drama to the next certainly left her curious as to who he _actually_ was beneath the bluster, beneath the armour. If she could overcome at least _some_ of the barriers and actually get to know him...

Assuming she could mitigate every one of these significant pain points, it was unlikely he wanted her company. He seemed to tolerate her at best, after all – the only exception she could think of was the brief few minutes she'd indulged in playing the piano aboard the lifeboat, though that in and of itself was one of the biggest generator of _these damned infernal questions_ that clawed at her psyche through every waking moment.

No, she needed to revive David and set him to work flying the ship.

Enough meaningless dots; she pressed the pen to the pad once more.

_I've never flown anything before. And the 'abomination' speaks one of your languages._

She hoped the latter would help underline David's usefulness as she handed the pad back to the Engineer.

At this point the more vivid of his emotions had washed away, leaving him in a far more familiar state of calm despite the distaste that lingered like a bad smell. Perhaps that was the reason behind the grim expression – unlikely, she quickly decided.

His response, after a delay, was a single word.

_Badly._

At any other time, she'd have interpreted that as an attempt at humour; here, now, she wasn't sure his kind – or he, at least – even possessed such a thing. She searched his eyes for any hint of what he was thinking, as difficult as that was when he towered over her and refused to stand near, having taken several steps away every time they exchanged notes. Devoid of humour, rage or insult, there was, in its place, almost a sense of resignation about him.

With a sigh, he leaned down and tugged the pad and pen from her grasp. He watched her from above for an age, dark eyes lingering beneath a heavy scowl, scrutinising her every feature until she felt bare, exposed...she wondered if the promise of a decapitated translator was looking more tempting to him at this point as he tried to pry something, anything meaningful from her. For every question she had of him, he undoubtedly had just as many of her – _especially_ after whatever the Hell had transpired here.

Finally, as the silence had once again begun to claw at her sanity, he pressed his eyes closed as he chewed on his bottom lip, then penned a response.

_This goes against my better judgement. Against everything I know. But I won't stop you from keeping your abomination._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in posting, folks. I've been doing 6 day weeks lately...not good for the writing. Arguably okay for the wallet.
> 
> This chapter was another difficult one to write for some reason, but this time I came prepared with an outline. Turns out I'm having to do that a lot more lately, as we start to get to the meat of the story. Believe it or not, this chapter makes up less than HALF of what I'd outlined to go down in Ch11...it would have blown out to something near 12,000 words if I'd continued. So we're cutting here.
> 
> On the plus side, I have plenty of material to launch into. Once I'm no longer working 50-60 hours back-to-back fml.
> 
> Also, thank you everyone for your kind feedback on the direction of this story. I'm one of those writers that takes immersion incredibly seriously, and if it's fanfiction, changing so little about the source material that the reader might just forget it's not actually canon. That's the aim, anyway. Call it decades of doodling around with Star Trek. I've got so many plans for where I'd like to take the Engineers as a species, as a people, and it scares the poop out of me that it's all going to be deprecated by the new movie when it comes out. However, you all make a great point...why not do it anyway, it's all just fiction at the end of the day...and IF it has potential to go further, take it from there!
> 
> I'll keep pumping this out as intended. We're about three-quarters of the way through now, then we're onto some pretty rapid universe expansion with a sequel where the cast is significantly larger and there's a lot more angst - there WILL be somewhat of a delay when that drops, because I'll be releasing the final chapter alongside the (re)launch of the sequel, and that second version I keep banging on about.
> 
> You're all wonderful and I've been absolutely loving the feedback. It inspires me to keep going, even after hellish weeks like this!


	12. Heathens

It seemed as though Elizabeth's time on this planet had been spent leaping from crisis to crisis, each of increasing magnitude and seemingly designed to test her structural integrity with increasing brutality. While nothing could have prepared her for any of this, what struck her was how _well_ she seemed to absorb the blows.

The scientist within reasoned that each disaster she survived taught her new things, etching increasingly spectacular survival skills into her very being as the current emergency waned and left her with just enough space to reflect – but never quite enough to properly mope. Realistically, she was a different person to the Dr Shaw that almost cried whilst lying in the stasis pod awaiting sleep. She was certainly a different person to the Dr Shaw that had hurled her guts up waking up from that two-year hypersleep fiasco, and bore only physical resemblance to her innocent, absent-minded namesake back on Earth.

The rest of her was something akin to the remnants of a high-speed crash, twisted metal and shattered glass in the wake of tragedy, frayed nerves and overtaxed faculties. Her hands still shook against the straps of the backpack as she marched across the dusty landscape, sand and silica whistling about her ankles in the dying light of dusk, rocks beneath her toes stained an otherworldly orange from the gas giant setting against the horizon. Her ears still rang, unable to claw from them the alien, incomprehensible shouts that had boomed across the Bridge and engraved themselves into her psyche. Her breath rattled in her throat with every gasp, though she wasn't sure if it had more to do with the weight of David's head in the pack behind her, or the residual terror that raked at her chest on the wake of the afternoon's turn of events.

Their march back to the lifeboat had been in stony, heavy silence, with the enormous Engineer remaining several paces ahead of her at all times and damn-near refusing to look at her unless he absolutely had to. After distracting himself with several consoles on the Bridge and, she presumed, downloading as much data as he could, he had finally returned to the issue of the broken android with as much reluctance as she'd ever seen in a man.

Communication had been predictably patchy around the issue as she avoided saying anything that had a snowball's chance in Hell of pissing him off and he intimated he would avoid answering _any_ of the questions she might have had on the subject, but a solution had nonetheless been reached. She'd quickly realised that David's power source must be in his body rather than his head; she'd also realised immediately afterward that he was _much_ heavier than she was. Even without the pack slung over her shoulders he was all but impossible to move beyond dragging across the floor, and despite his previous ranting outburst, Za'il had begrudgingly intervened before she'd managed to wrangle the decapitated body halfway across the Bridge.

His mighty sigh and grim expression hadn't been lost on her, nor had his refusal of eye contact.

With the android body slung over his shoulder, the Engineer had made short work of exiting the crashed vessel the way they'd come in, apparently unencumbered by the extra weight even as they abseiled back down to the planet's surface. He needed only one arm to shift the deadweight about, and did so as if he were lightweight cargo; Elizabeth had hardly been able to move him.

Like she needed any of these constant reminders of the Engineer's obscene strength.

Who knew how much time their disagreement had lasted; the sun was gone by now, with only residual light hanging about the sky as they reached the lifeboat airlock. She didn't quite know what to make of him standing by the door as she struggled to catch up. He'd followed her inside after a breath, barely making it past the piano before unceremoniously dumping the headless body in the middle of the floor beside it and nudging it aside with a boot as he pulled his helmet off, expression still lingering on the sour, offended side of inscrutable.

Shaw dropped the pack alongside the body with far more grace than he'd bothered with, lips pursed in thought for a moment before sauntering back to the airlock to remove the suit that had all but adhered to her sticky, sweaty flesh. The cool, crisp air aboard the lifeboat was a welcome change to the increasingly moist, stuffy microcosm beneath the scuffed polymer dome, but not cool enough to make sitting about in the scant clothing beneath the suit uncomfortable. It tugged at her limbs as she extracted herself from its confines; tonight's shower was going to be _bloody well-earned_.

The Engineer hadn't made himself at home yet, she noted as she watched him pace. He'd barely stood still for a second as he pried the heavy armour from its fixings along the biosuit below, pacing all the while, and only moved across the room to place it back in the crate it came from after she had exited the airlock alcove and set about freeing David from the pack sitting alongside his body.

Still refusing eye contact, it was safe to assume he remained tremendously unhappy. She had noted on several occasions to date that he preferred space between them, but this was a significant increase to the point of metres keeping them apart at any given moment.

How she wished, she _wished_ she could simply _ask him_ what she'd done wrong. She hadn't created David; was merely fraternising with him a cardinal sin amongst Za'il's people?

This did not bode well for any attempted mission to the Engineer homeworld; if she'd so seriously offended just one member, how many _other_ faux pas would she stumble upon in her travels?

David's head was heavy and cool to the touch, though his skin – if it could be called that – was upsettingly realistic beneath her fingertips. Unseeing eyes open but glazed, in the brighter and more familiar setting of the lifeboat he seemed far more like a corpse than she'd cared to notice whilst aboard the Engineer vessel. It took all her might to suppress another visceral shudder, actively reminding herself with every heartbeat that he was an android, not a dead body, and that this was just fine.

_Just fine._

Placing the head down mere inches from its correct place, it became far easier to see the extent of the damage; while didn't appear to have a recognisably Human skeleton _per se_ , what stood in its place appeared to have sheared off during the decapitation process, twisted metal split between what passed as vertebrae. Every single cable had snapped in kind, torn upward and hanging loose both from the gaping hole between the shoulders and below what remained of the neck. A significant volume of coolant, or android blood in a manner of speaking, had flowed out of the severed pipes to the head and flooded the damaged components throughout the torso.

This was going to take a lot longer than she anticipated. Not that one could accurately anticipate the significant damage left after _decapitation_.

A quick trip to the medbay yielded a few basic tools after a quick rummage; she'd recalled, in the distant vestiges of her mind, stumbling upon some repair equipment as she hunted for ways of sealing her own horrifying wound days earlier. David himself would likely end up doing the majority of the repairs once he was able, _if_ he was able, but for now this would have to suffice.

The Engineer, she noted at a glance, had settled on the couch in a tense, hunched crouch as he fiddled with equipment of his own, still pointedly ignoring her. At the very least, perhaps he was restraining himself, or preparing to with the knowledge that the _abomination_ would soon be alive once more; she was not looking forward to the inevitable firestorm when David choked to life.

Pulling on a pair of thick, insulated rubber gloves, she set about making _some_ sense of the matted mess of torn wires and conduits dangling from both pieces of android. The brief crash course in Weyland Android maintenance had seemed excessive at the time, but she had been _quite_ impatient to get the mission underway in the days leading up to takeoff. As determined to pay attention as she had been, a frustrating amount of knowledge had slipped from her grasp and into the abyss that was the pacing, over-thinking, planning, hand-wringing slurry of the final preparation for _Prometheus_ ; brief, she noted in hindsight, had been exactly that.

Still, it was enough to allow her to identify the android's power management. A thick rope of conduit hung from the centre of something analogous to a spinal cord, torn upward as the head had been snapped from its body; while some of the cabling had been ripped and left frayed, this cable's severed ends seemed far more uniform. It was as if they had been sliced all at once with an incredibly sharp blade.

Or, she remarked, as if they had been pulled out the end of a plug.

A quick scout in the android's neck found exactly that. Round, metallic, the plug had remained with its mate during the violent disassembly, the cables on the body's end ripped free of their fixtures.

_Could be worse._

As she worked on popping the plug halves apart, the Engineer had apparently busied himself with the results of the scan aboard the other vessel. A projection of the smaller vacant ship, far more blob-like in its semicircular form, hung above the coffee table in significant detail, showing every nuance of the hull and each internal system snaking below its surface in shades of white and cyan; his dark eyes drank it in with almost artificial intrigue, tracing every feature as if it were the only thing in the room, checking and re-checking system after system.

Choosing to follow his example, she decided to ignore what he was doing. They may be able to straighten out a few things once David functioned again, she reasoned; until then, it was no use doing anything to make matters worse.

Once she was sure the plug had correctly seated itself, she prepared to snap it back in place; this was the moment of truth, the moment everything would change, the moment two became three. Her hands shook as they lingered between the two halves of the plug. She hoped she would not regret this.

Nothing for it.

With a metallic _click_ , the two halves unified between the tangle of wires and shredded edges of bioskin, and…

...nothing happened. The android's head remained frozen in time, staring at nothing, transfixed upon the ceiling. It was if he was too far gone, too broken to save – or, perhaps, simply too broken to have been so easily fixed. There _had_ to be a manual for these confounded things in that pile of books, there _had_ to be some kind of bloody instructions for how to reassemble–

A faint artificial _whirr_ snapped her from her cascade of consciousness as she was about to stand; nothing followed for a few seconds, leaving her hovering between kneeling and crouching until an electrical _pop_ echoed about the deck, startling both her and the giant on the couch, leaving them both in a wide-eyed gawp as the android's pale gaze finally found focus. Moments later his lips fluttered, words fading from them the moment they formed, stammering silently as his pupils shrank to the size of pinheads then wildly dilated. Frozen in shuddering catatonia, the android fought the brink of death for an indeterminate period as Elizabeth held her breath.

The part of her that considered David to be a person – and it was, she conceded, a _significant_ part of her – found the process to be disturbingly grotesque. If he could feel, he would undoubtedly be feeling substantial pain. If he hadn't already, soon he would realise he was still severed in two and could do nothing about it. It seemed inhumane.

"Elizabeth, y-you're alive." The voice below was a series of mechanical croaks, disjointed and almost incomprehensible, slow and deliberate and clearly forced. Silver eyes had finally focused on her, moving from their fixated, forward-facing gaze. His mouth still quivered. Yes, if he were Human, he would be in absolute agony.

But he wasn't; projecting that onto him would serve no useful purpose, she scolded herself.

She smiled gently. "Yes, I am."

A lengthy pause ensued as the android continued to analyse his surroundings, analyse himself. "You've r-reconnected my p-power supply."

His voice hadn't improved; she took a moment to interpret the crackling, low-fidelity sounds he'd ejected at her. "I have. You're really badly damaged, it's going to take me a while to put you back together."

"I unders-s-stand," he croaked, shivering mouth finally finding purchase and pulling itself into the faintest quirk of a smile. "I will be more useful once m-my b-backup has some charge."

Slipping from her crouch, she eased herself onto the cold, polished floor below. "How long do you think that will take?"

"Perhaps a-another thirty s-seconds," he stammered; there was a more Human tone to his voice by now, despite the metallic crackle that remained. "My s-secondary systems a-are c-coming online now."

Shaw drew a heavy breath, daring to cast a glance toward the Engineer; as she could have expected he was still staring intently at the holo over the table, but there was a deep, irritated scowl that lingered. For some reason, that annoyed her. There was no doubt he was perfectly aware of what was going on around him, that there was a new person – _person!_ – in the room, but he refused to acknowledge either of the smaller beings.

"Elizabeth," the android started again after another long pause, his voice by now recognisably _his_ , "I have quite a few questions to ask, if I may."

"Sure," she quickly replied, tugging the gloves from her hands and placing them on his chest.

The first apparently took a while to form. Perhaps it jostled for pride of place at the front of the queue. Regardless, he took his dear, sweet time in asking it. "Am I to assume circumstances have changed, given the presence of the Engineer aboard the lifeboat?"

If he was perturbed by this discovery, he hid it well. She offered a humourless smile. "You could say that."

"Is he friendly?"

_Is he friendly_ … to be honest, she didn't know. Patiently offering her medicine before mending his own broken arm had seemed pretty friendly at the time, as had sharing a much-needed meal and a drink afterward. The direct, unyielding line of questioning the moment they discovered a common-enough language hadn't been kind, nor had his reaction to her sharing perhaps a little _too_ much of her objectives with him. His manhandling of her in the immediate aftermath had been downright hostile, but seeing him collapse in a catatonic heap in finally learning his own fate had damn-near broken her. Perhaps she had been a fool, but their sharing of music had given her hope they had common ground, that they could be friends...their teamwork and negotiation afterward had reinforced that, only to have it smashed to smithereens when she'd tried to recover the blasted creature asking _these_ questions. A heavy sigh escaped her. "Friendly enough."

His icy eyes pried at her with an astuteness that left her uncomfortable. The polite gentleness in his voice only multiplied the effect; he probably didn't realise just how patronising it would come across. "I can see an awful lot has happened while I was non-functional. Are you alright, Elizabeth?"

"I'm fine," she scowled. "I'll fill you in when I have the time. I don't mean to be rude, but we're running to somewhat of a schedule. We're planning on leaving this planet tomorrow, and I need your help. First, _I_ need to help _you_ – where do I start with repairs?"

"It's complicated," he eventually stammered, gaze once again upon the ceiling. "The broken sections of my spine can be replaced easily enough, but every major system going to my head has been severed, as you can see. I imagine many of the conduits are torn in a manner that could make reconnection challenging."

"They are, yes," she responded glumly. "Lots of ripped parts. They look too fragile to do much with."

"Quite all right," he enthused with a forced smile. It was odd, watching his facial features move entirely normally with his head fixed in place. After a moment's reflection, the smile became palpably genuine. "Perhaps we'll start by replacing the torn ends with new joints and connect them that way, should you be able to find the master repair kit. Far less fiddly work for everyone."

"That sounds like a good idea," she nodded. "Where do I start?"

"In the medbay there should be a tool kit in a blue metal case." He struggled to follow her as she stood to begin her search; she quickly left the range of his gaze, unable to turn his head to track her. A series of opening and slamming cupboards followed, interspersed by determined rustling. "It should be on the bottom shelf of one of the instrument cupboards. It's quite large."

A surprised, strained grunt immediately followed the _scrape_ of metal against polymer and a heavy, bassy _thunk_. "You don't say."

"I would help you if I could," he offered with an apologetic smile.

"Of course you would." Her voice couldn't hide the strain as she hoisted the case off the ground and quickly shuffled across the hall back to the separated android. She placed it down by his chest with a grunt. If there was ever a time to be immensely grateful for her fully-healed state, it was now. "Right. How do I go about this?"

"In the second tier, there should be an assortment of titanium connectors," he stated, jarringly matter-of-fact. "There is also an assortment of blades. The best place to start would be my coolant conduits; slice a clean edge at each end and affix a connector, it'll make reassembling me on the fly quite straightforward."

"Roger that," she quipped, and immediately began rummaging about in silence.

The silence dragged on, with the android's gaze darting about the full dome of view available to him; both living beings went about their tasks wordlessly fixated on the technology they were tasked with, a tension about both that was not lost on David. He was left to presume what might be normal behaviour for an Engineer, but this he knew was out-of-character enough of a Human like Elizabeth that it warranted further investigation. As connector after connector fell into place, he finally dared to break the silence. "Elizabeth, your survival instinct is quite remarkable. May I ask – how is it that you've come to be uninjured?"

"Our new ally had a hand in that," she eventually murmured as she severed another shredded, messy conduit end. "Engineer medicine is remarkable."

"He offered you medicine?" His intrigue was overshadowed by grim nuance. "Mr Weyland would have been so pleased to have seen it. It was what he was see–"

"Say that name again and I'm sticking this scalpel right into your power cord," she spat darkly, albeit barely above a whisper. The Engineer's gaze snapped to her, briefly wide-eyed and questioning, darting between the woman, the blade and the startled android head beneath her. "It's _his_ fault we're all in this mess. He's _dead_ , David. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"I-I…" the android stammered, prying at the sudden, determined fury that stained the woman's expression. There was little doubt she would make good of that threat if pressed. "I was just observing–"

"Don't," she growled, lips downturned into a sneer. "Everything that transpired here was thanks to his self-absorbed obsession for power. Worship. Eternal life. He doomed us all to die. It makes me sick. The only reason either you or I are alive right now is because I've been the _exact opposite_ of him for God-knows how long it's been since…"

Prone as he was, all he could do was watch as Dr Shaw's righteous rage melted into something far more sullen as she trailed off. "I think I understand, Elizabeth. I apologise. Perhaps some good may have come out of all this after all, though; those objectives led us to your _friend_ on the couch."

"Who led every last survivor of this stupid expedition to their deaths," she fumed, anger once again twisting her features.

"Except you."

Her breath caught in her throat before words could form, though they tore at her lips in an ugly grimace. This wasn't the conversation she wanted to have right now – or _ever_ , to be fair – but here they were. Her _friend_ hunched over the table at the other end of the room had by now all but forgotten his task, clearly startled into complete absorption by the sudden change from passive dialogue into quick-fire, black, one-directional hostility. For the briefest of moments she found herself tumbling into those dark, inhuman eyes, seeking fleeting solace in the only living being left on the planet, refusing to acknowledge that he was as alien to her as David, until he finally pried his gaze away and hastily resumed his intense study of the hologram before him.

"Elizabeth," he whispered. Pleaded. "Elizabeth, I am sorry – I don't know what to say without upsetting you, but I feel we have much ground to cover before I can be useful."

Whatever response had begun to crystallise quickly shattered into dust as his words echoed about her skull and back at her in her own voice. _He_ was now the lost and confused, prone and scrambling for words; _she_ was pale and enormous, towering over him and fighting through fury to find the words for her disgust. This time, words should not be so damned _hard_ to find. They shared a common language!

They didn't share empathy, compassion, or emotion though, did they? The Human condition in and of itself was a language in its own right, and damn-near impossible to translate into the sort of rational, empirical language that machines understood. It was the only thing that kept the tenuous fibres of peace intact between herself and the Engineer. The creature before her had only spoken words, devoid of their Humanity.

"I know," she finally whispered, gaze fixed on the blade between her busy, fussing fingers. "I'm sorry. It's been an _extremely_ hard few days, and I'm struggling to put it all into words."

"May I ask, then," he began gently, "What happened immediately after I contacted you? The comms went silent after that, and I assumed you had died. He intended to find you and kill you."

In that, she had no doubt; she knew her choice of cowardice had been the only thing leaving her alive now, but with as many brushes with death as she'd had of late, it had never eventuated, had it? As much as she wanted to push the memories from her mind, the events of that day had burned tracks into her psyche that would undoubtedly leave permanent scars. Pressing her eyes closed, she recounted the events that had transpired after killing her comms: hiding from the Engineer; awaiting in increasing horror as he discovered, then battled the monster-sized Trilobite locked in the medbay; deciding to go out with a bang when she could no longer tolerate his terrified screams, and joining the fray with an axe; extending the proverbial olive branch by splinting his broken forearm; stitching herself together once he'd dragged the carcass from the lifeboat and disappeared.

Even in retelling stomach-churning tale, she had lost count of just how many days had lurched by in the never-ending series of crises merging into one, vulcanised only by fleeting glimmers of hope and Humanity.

"Is it after you fell asleep on the couch that he returned with his own medical supplies?" David asked, matter-of-fact and a little too gentle.

"Yes, it is," she murmured, casting the creature a brief glance. At some point he had stopped pretending to focus on the holo, instead defaulting to blankly staring through it with his head in one hand, likely listening to the alien exchange whilst lost in his own world. "It's just a substance that heals wounds; he used it on my incision, then on the burns on his face. No idea how it works, but all I have left now is a faint, white scar – nothing more."

"I see." Not the fabled, presumed Elixir of Life _per se_ , then. "I'm curious. How did you manage to coexist in peace with him until now? As I understand it, I was the only member of the _Prometheus_ crew that could speak any language common to both species."

"Brute force and ignorance," she grinned grimly; she'd wanted to use that phrase for a while now. "I found a stack of magazines on board that had articles about quite a range of ancient ruins. I made a few educated guesses, showing the spreads with photos of anything with text until he responded. Apparently, of all things, he can read Sumerian with some modicum of fluency. Wasn't the one I would have picked first, but at the same time, I'm not surprised."

"Sumerian," the android mused quietly. "That's _two_ Earth languages he can speak, then. This is fascinating – I really would like to know more."

"So would I." She paused to snip another ragged end, quickly slipping a connector over it and snapping it in place. "That's why I need you, actually. Can you still translate?"

"I'm afraid I can't, at the moment," he sighed. Apparently his Human-like affectations were synthetic; without lungs, it ought to have been impossible. "I'm sorry. Much of my long-term data storage and the secondary processing required for the task is where your liver would be; my connection to that resource has been severed. I have _some_ vocabulary, and I'll likely be able to understand _some_ of what he says, but I fear I will struggle to accurately verbalise what's being said."

"Brilliant." Pursing her lips through the disappointment, she set about cleaning up the frayed pipes dangling from his neck. "To be honest, I don't know it would have worked, anyway. He seems pretty offended by you."

"I gathered as much," he mused, his apparent amusement seeming oddly black. "I still don't understand why he beheaded me."

"Neither do I. From what I can tell, his people abhor your kind. He called you an abomination. Damn-near refused to help me carry you back here. But given our communication difficulties and the fact that he seems to fly off the handle if I give him too much information or ask too much, I don't actually know _why_ and I'm not sure asking him will keep _me_ in one piece, either."

"I'm surprised you're alive at all," he responded thoughtfully. "Not a comment on your remarkable survival skills, mind; if he's so temperamental, it's even more of a feat that you've managed to befriend him."

"I wouldn't say _befriend_." Her eyes found the floor; her fingers pawed at the blade. "I _wish_ it were so; if anything we've struck a truce, perhaps an alliance of sorts. He's found two abandoned Engineer ships, and we've been preparing to take them. Safe to assume he doesn't exactly want our company. I get the sense he's just been _tolerating_ me out of necessity."

David's thoughts lingered a moment as his limited resources ploughed through every inch of data available to him. Something about that assessment just didn't seem _right_. "What could he need from us? He has an advanced warship at his disposal. Propulsion and weapons are damaged beyond feasible repair, but life support is more than functional aboard his ship."

"It's also full of dead bodies," she mused with a grim huff. "I don't know. I'd assumed there was some reason he didn't stay aboard his own ship. He's had plenty of opportunities to abandon this one."

"I did hear him come and go once, before my cranial batteries died."

True; that would have been when he returned for medical supplies. She had been completely out-cold by that point. "I don't know – there must be more to the story. Frankly I _still_ know next-to-nothing about him. I have a name and a job title, and that's it; everything else I know is to do with the layout of the base and that it's infested with some mysterious alien life...and not the sort that we've encountered yet."

"A name and a role is a great start," he enthused gently. "Perhaps when I'm assembled, it will be easier to communicate with him."

"Doubt it'll happen in time. We're meant to be going our separate ways tomorrow." There was a resigned disappointment tainting her voice; as much as she wouldn't admit to such a thing, it felt far too early to be parting ways from the mysterious, tempestuous creature.

"What else have you been able to discover about him – in the absence of language?"

"He's argumentative," she quickly responded with a grin that felt somewhat inappropriate. "He's intelligent, but _very_ focused on the task at hand. Seems uninterested in the Human race, but strangely drawn to anything to do with our art or culture. That ring of books in the middle of the floor – that was him, not me. He figured out how to play the piano while I was asleep. Had a rather unexpected reaction when I played it for him, like the rest of the world stopped existing around us for a moment. They're violent, that much I can assume, but he seems to restrain that tendency around me – for the most part. They _do_ mourn just as we do, which was strangely reassuring...he was a mess when he came back from his ship a second time. Figured out just how long he'd been asleep. He's been a little subdued since then, but...I suppose that's hardly a surprise, is it?"

"Indeed. A wealth of knowledge, if you consider how little you've been able to communicate." The rattle in his voice had not improved; time would tell whether it was due to the damage of his beheading, or due to simply being such. "What _is_ his job? I get the sense that this is a military installation."

"It is a military base, yes. What kind, I don't know. His name is Za'il, he's the ship's pilot – he didn't give me anything more to go by than that."

A deep, agitated grunt of a sigh came from the couch; she immediately knew what she'd done wrong. Rather than fury beneath his heavy scowl, there was something far more akin to insult – it was the second time today she'd had to contend with _that_ particular, sour expression. Of course; if they were going to converse in a language he didn't understand, _his own damn name_ would have been _outrageously familiar_ amongst the chaos. He spat something in his own tongue in a trite tone, annoyed gaze flitting between the woman and the blonde-haired head beside her.

The android fumbled for words, lips flapping uselessly as the pale-skinned giant returned to his work with a heavy frown still etched into his features. When words finally formed, they were as robotic and barely-recognisable as they had been in English in the moments after she'd resurrected him. Painfully slow and staccato, the inhuman response yielded a startled jump from the Engineer, followed by a deeper scowl and an indignant response spat with obvious vitriol.

David's pupils dilated to pinheads once more as he struggled to process what had just transpired; Za'il returned to his work once more with a grimace that she couldn't quite place, lips contorted with barely-restrained emotion as he stabbed at the projector controls. The smaller ship faded from view, replaced by the warship which bore far more resemblance to his own.

"What did he say, David," she whispered, unsure where to place her gaze at this point.

"I can't translate it word-for-word, I'm sorry," he drawled, his overtaxed language systems apparently fading beneath the multitasking required of it. "He is unhappy we're talking about him. And he doesn't want to talk to me. He was far more articulate than that, though."

The overwhelming urge to apologise, yet again, had her in its grasp; for once, she _knew_ why he was so offended. Damn this language barrier, damn it to Hell. "Is there a way I can help you access some of your other resources?"

"I think there is. Let's try." His voice had returned to its borderline-Human rattle, having abandoned translation duties. "The blue-and-black fibre-optic cable running alongside my spine. There are larger connectors that will automatically bond to the end of the fibres, you'll just need to trim the torn ends as you did with the coolant conduits."

"On it," she nodded, snatching at the larger connectors in the repair kit before returning her attention to the mass of shredded conduits dangling from both severed ends of the android. "I suspect it'll be difficult to get him to actually talk instead of argue once we do get your functioning correctly, he's not exactly the talkative type. But I guess if our roles were reversed, and I was marooned on a planet, alone, with only an alien whose race I despised, I wouldn't be overly chatty either."

" _Do_ they despise us, though?"

"Your kind, yes," she replied softly. "He'd said as much. Mine, I'm making the assumption. I don't know his motivations around _that_ , either. Any theory I manage to form gets blown out of the water not long after. I've had ample time to sit on my chuff and think about it, but I still can't make heads or tails of it – what we did to earn our fate, why they suddenly decided they hated us after tens of centuries of contact. His fascination with our _things_ but not our _people_ makes so little sense. I keep finding new ways of upsetting him too, but he never quite gets around to killing me like he did the others."

Much fiddling preceded a series of stiff _clacks_ as the thick ends of the data conduit finally came together with the aid of its new plugs; the android flinched momentarily, pupils dilating to unnaturally wide, black hoops, before slowly retracting and grappling with the chandelier above. A soft squeak escaped him, lips twitching. There was something about his dignity being stripped from him that left her pitying the creature far more than she'd like.

More catatonia followed before Shaw finally shifted her weight from her knees to her rear, placing one hand against the android's chest. "David, are you alright?"

"I believe so," he whispered after another drawn pause. "Thank you. I can access _some_ of my data – enough to hold a rudimentary conversation, I suspect. Is there anything you would like to say to our guest?"

Damnit. Every time the opportunity arose to unload any of the _thousands_ of questions darting about her head, they all dissipated in a flash, leaving her alone and wordless. Exposed. It was infuriating – exhausting. She scowled. "I have no idea where to start. Maybe we should ask him if he would like to talk – if he was willing to talk to me."

"Understood, ma'am." _Ma'am?_ Since when did that happen?

The words that followed weren't English; though the distortion in his voice remained, David's control over the language spilling forth was vastly more fluent with the newly-repaired cable in place and doing its job. Gone was the juddering, stuttering staccato that left _any_ language feeling alien and vaguely upsetting; surely these words would be comprehensible, despite how badly Za'il thought he spoke them.

The latter visibly stiffened upon hearing words in a language he understood, ripples of sinew flowing along his cheeks and jaw as he clenched his teeth and pressed his eyes closed. David's expectant gaze remained on the roof as silence enveloped the room; Za'il's was firmly fixed on the projection in front of him. Drawing it out far longer than necessary, he finally responded with a short, sharp syllable that she'd come to recognise as negative, perhaps 'no', followed by several more grumpily-ejected words.

With the impossible politeness she'd come to recognise, David meekly pressed again; this time, she heard her own name amongst what he had to say. The Engineer froze in place upon hearing it, its syllables foreign and jarring against the far more guttural language presently being exchanged. This time, troubled black eyes flitted to her after a heavy pause, prying at every inch of her with a frustratingly unreadable expression tugging his pale features taut. He stared for an age, a thousand thoughts prying at his psyche; she couldn't tell if he was as lost for words as she was, or whether he was torn as to what to say first. At this point, even if it was an outburst of rejection, she would take _anything_.

Finally, he mumbled something with vastly less venom than she'd expected, casting his gaze down at his own hands; David's eyebrows quirked upward at the remark, glancing up at the woman sitting beside him. "He doesn't have a lot to say, he reckons."

_Typical_. With a frustrated huff, she fidgeted against the cold floor and rearranged her legs into a schoolyard crossed position. "Neither do I, to be honest. Nothing that won't get me punched across the room, anyway. I don't even know where to start building his trust – I think I shattered it to pieces when I insisted on dragging you back here. I guess...I guess we should ask him if there was a way to make our presence here less intolerable for him."

"I will try." And try he did; as polite as ever, he gently offered another question in that foreign tongue, only to be cut off by a loud, indignant razz from the couch and a distinctly irritated response. The Engineer briefly caught Elizabeth's eye as he spoke, quickly returning it in all its scornful glory to the android. David's second attempt to speak was also cut off before he could finish, politeness overwhelmed by the larger being's scornful tone. She ought to have predicted this sort of response, but what she was left with in place of surprise was cold, hollow acknowledgement that she simply _did not know this man at all_.

An awful lot of conversation flourished for someone proclaiming no interest; back and forth they continued, the android's infinite patience matched only by the Engineer's barely-restrained, simmering hatred. Strings of one-word answers, snapped at the floating head through gritted teeth, littered the space between longer diatribes; one huge, pale hand gripped the couch cushion with enough force to nearly tear at the fabric while the other alternated between frantic gesticulations and gripping at his head in abject frustration. Though he was hardly shouting – enthusiastically emphasising his point was probably more accurate – Elizabeth was still left with heavy, nagging hammering in her ears as adrenaline flooded her veins and tugged at her chest. She didn't even know where to begin in analysing just how much she _didn't_ want to be here right now, doing this.

She soon lost count of the oscillations of conversation between the two men, struggling as she was to distill any kind of meaning from the Engineer's body language in the absence of the spoken word; David's mild-mannered assertions faded into the shadows of Za'il's more forceful castigations, though she caught her name amongst the lengthy proceedings – twice. Along the way, it became easier to discern more granular emotions from the immense creature – or, perhaps, his rage had faded into something more subtle. The jitters of adrenaline made it difficult to tell. Either way, as the two bantered on, it appeared more like Za'il was scolding a naughty child than resisting the urge to tear him limb from limb.

Something about that bothered her.

Though she couldn't understand a word of what was happening, she most certainly understood the tone; it was that same impatient rudeness as multiple _Prometheus_ crew members had directed at the android throughout the mission, a poorly-masked disdain for a supposedly inferior form of life. Did he possess the sentience to be as troubled by it as she was? Did he appreciate that she refused to treat him the same way, despite the _many things_ she needed to discuss with him that had weighed on her mind for days?

There was a key difference, she noted, as Za'il launched into another ill-tempered diatribe. There had been a dismissive, disinterested manner in which many _Prometheus_ crew members had treated David that was, on reflection, missing here. Za'il had by now taken to letting him finish before interjecting, maintaining as much eye contact as possible with David's head rendered motionless despite the _immense_ distaste twisted into his skin. What had seemed like yet more of the near-mechanical disregard one reserved for mere appliances hadn't lasted much longer than the first few interactions.

He was treating David as if he were _stupid_ , but not _inanimate_.

The deep, booming voice had by now lost its gruff, alien tone, yielding to longer pauses and a change of emotion that she couldn't quite place. Some of David's comments appeared to leave a hint of confusion about the Engineer's sour expression, and as they continued, Za'il's own responses gradually grew quieter and quieter, the pauses between lingering longer, his eye contact all but severed as he gazed through the wall opposite the couch. She flinched as she heard her own name again; the mention of it had a similar effect on Za'il, snatching the words from him and leaving him in silence. The only reply he offered to whatever was asked was a hesitant shake of the head.

"What on Earth is going on, David?" She had tolerated enough exclusion, she reckoned; twice today, the shoe had been on the other foot, most certainly with the right on the left. It was, if nothing else, a lesson in humility.

"He's given me some... _background_ on his hatred of my kind," David replied meekly.

She found herself chewing on her bottom lip, heart once again in her throat. "Did he say anything about mine?"

"No. He changes the topic whenever I ask. But he apparently has no problem with _you_."

"But you came from us," she protested quietly. "What's the bloody difference?"

"I can ask," he mused brightly – and did just that.

The response, predictably, was snapped loudly and indignantly, the pale giant raising both hands in exasperation. It would never be anything short of startling, she was forced to admit as she flinched away from the noise; he just had so much more capacity for noise, and the confines of the small vessel where a spectacular echo chamber. After all this dialogue she was relatively sure she wasn't about to meet a grisly end, but as the old theories went, Humans were not so far up the evolutionary tree from animals.

The animal within had just about hit the roof with fright. She quickly became aware she was all but cowering.

Silence, deafening silence followed; she squeaked an eye open after a few panicked breaths, catching a glimpse of the Engineer from under the refuge of one pale forearm.

She'd expected many things, but watching his expression twist into one of afflicted realisation had been the last on her list. He was staring _right at her_. She'd seen _that_ look on his face before, too; the black hand-marks on her arms had wrung it from him the moment he'd laid eyes on them.

Seconds ticked by before he finally found his breath, his gaze trailing to the floor as he scraped for words. The fight left him as his eyes fell closed, shoulders slumping – with a soft sigh, he murmured something quietly, cautiously, then promptly pushed himself to his feet, and, with his head lowered in one hand, marched from the couch to the door leading to the bedroom, sliding it shut behind him.

Elizabeth's own hands gripped at her hair through the quiet that ensued. Dark eyes watched the android expectantly.

David painted on his best sympathetic smile. "He apologises for 'constantly scaring the shit' out of you – his words, not mine." He paused for a synthetic sigh. "Might I presume your dealings with him to date have been this...tempestuous?"

"Not quite," she laughed bitterly, shaking her head as she leaned against one thigh with a claw-like grasp. Her breath rattled in her chest, limbs still jittering with adrenaline. "Not like that, anyway. At least, not until this afternoon. What did you say that got him so worked up?"

"I simply rephrased your question," he responded in a matter-of-fact tone. "Before that, we were discussing...I suppose what might pass as a brief, subjective history lesson."

The distant hiss through the ship's pipes preceded the tell-tale clatter of water falling against the shower's floor. She pressed her eyes closed and shook her head, amused by the fact that she desperately wanted to hide in there now it was occupied and off-limits. "The history of what, exactly?"

"His kind's interactions with lifeforms much like myself." He paused a moment, studying the ceiling as he assembled his thoughts. "What he described seemed like artificial life far more advanced than anything we've created on Earth, but it also seemed as though it existed in the distant past by the way he referred to it. He'd never encountered one until we'd awoken him. It seems his people...experimented with more than just _biological_ creation – and it appears that creation may have, perhaps, gone to pot."

That echoed wording was not lost on Elizabeth; she nodded, a thoughtful grimace forming as she recalled the horror of seeing thousands upon thousands of cylinders aboard the Engineer ship, all presumably loaded to the brim with black, liquid death. "Seems like they may not have a perfect track record with their creativity, huh?"

"Seems not, indeed." Something about the whole scenario seemed to amuse David; he made no attempt to hide the faint smile that had grown from mere intrigue once the two of them were alone. "Admittedly, much of what he said was simply berating me for existing – or, more specifically, berating my creators. He kept referring to me as a _lifeform_ , though, Doctor. Life – not a mere gadget." His smile grew. It was almost wistful.

Shaw found herself mirroring the expression. "You _do_ tick a few of the boxes, though, don't you? You're self-aware, for one."

"Yes," he enthused quietly. "But I was designed for a purpose, to serve others. Humans. Mr Weyland and Ms Vickers, specifically. I have been treated as such almost without exception."

"Out of curiosity, who were those exceptions?"

"The Engineer," he responded, gaze lingering by the bedroom door for a moment, before drifting back to Elizabeth, "And you."

A broad, involuntary grin overcame her. "For what it's worth, that probably has something to do with the fact that I always considered you to be a person, David. A troubled one, mind. One I need to have a long talk with." She patted his chest with her palm, shifting against the polished surface as her thighs threatened to stick to it. "But for now, I can't bare to leave a _person_ in this state of disrepair. Obviously it's going to take a bit of work to get you back in order, and we might have to transport you in two pieces. What's your recommendation for preparing for that outcome? Shall I continue capping the damaged conduits?"

"Yes, please." With the quirk of a brow, his manner was all business once more. "It will make it far easier to assemble me once every torn end is replaced with connectors; that will leave replacing the broken vertebrae as the only obstacle to my proper functioning. It would be wise to refill my coolant reservoirs and clean the residue from what leaked out if possible – I cannot function properly without it."

"Understood," she nodded, tugging on the gloves as she set about her work. "I should be able to get most of that done tonight."

"Wonderful, Doctor," he grinned. "I do very much appreciate your efforts."

"You're welcome, David." How nice it was, she mused, to be exchanging pleasantries with someone. Anyone.

"Once you're done for the evening, I might power down." One eye twitched shut as gloved fingers trimmed a thin, torn conduit amongst many leading from the base of his skull. "The battery reserves in my head can hold three days' charge, and they will recharge more fully if I am...unconscious. There is a hidden switch below my right ear that you can use to reactivate me whenever you wish."

Shaw pulled a face as she paused to observe him. "Whenever _I_ wish? When would _you_ like to be reactivated, David?"

That question kept him occupied for a few moments; eventually he, raised both brows. "Perhaps just before you are ready to leave. Earlier, if you would like me to...help…" He trailed off. "Not that there's much I can help with, I'm sorry."

"It's alright," she grinned. "We'll handle it.

* * *

It had been dark for a few hours by the time Elizabeth had capped every broken wire in the android's neck and found both his coolant reservoirs and the fluid to fill them with amongst the hubris in the medbay. By the time she had emptied two entire bottles of the milky gunk into a hidden port below David's chest, tidied up the mess and packed the immense toolkit away, she was utterly exhausted. A gaping yawn elicited a loud _crack_ from her jaw; she all but swallowed her fist as she sought to silence it.

She'd wondered when the Engineer would be finished with his shower; it had been over an hour since he'd stepped in, and once again she'd almost reached the point of wondering if she ought to check he was still alive and conscious in there. At this point she was too exhausted to follow suit with a shower of her own – the exhaustion gripped her bones, and all she could think about was curling up somewhere quiet and sleeping the sleep of the dead.

David had by now wished her a good night and powered down, this time closing his eyes as every hint of life drained from his synthetic features. She wasn't sure if it was any less off-putting than the glass-eyed, dead stare she found him wearing aboard the Engineer ship; it would be better, she reasoned, once his damn head was connected to the rest of him.

Water glass in one hand, edge of the bar in the other, she was inches from nodding off where she stood when the bedroom door finally slid open. Predictably back in his biosuit, the only sign that Za'il had spent all that time in the shower at all was the strange limbo between refreshment and complete exhaustion written all over his features; he cast her a fleeting, bloody unreadable expression as he quietly sauntered across the floor toward the couch before sinking down onto it with a drained huff, quickly followed by a jaw-popping yawn, and a soft murmur of something she had no hope of understanding.

Draining the rest of her glass, she resisted a second, copycat yawn as she headed for the bedroom. She offered the pale, hunched figure a gentle nod and a quiet 'goodnight', not bothering to slide the door shut behind her as she killed the lights, collapsed into the bedsheets fully-dressed and almost immediately succumbed to the warm, cosy tendrils of sleep.

* * *

_Skitter skitter skitter._

In the furthest vestiges of her sleeping mind, she imagined a large animal darting across the roof of her father's caravan, one with the cool, dry night as it sought refuge amongst the clutter of Human settlement. The _clickety-click_ of sharp claws against the metal surface had her picturing a large bird of some kind, perhaps a vulture; she'd heard similar sounds many times in the past, remembering to stay clear of whatever it was making the noise and avoid drawing attention to herself. Humans were not the biggest, most dangerous animals in the Savannah.

_K-tap, tap, tap, tap, tap._

Her mind slowly, gradually faded toward wakefulness as the sounds continued, bringing with them somewhat different spectres from the past; these were footfalls of some kind, that much was obvious, but the pacing was wrong for any sort of bird that had found itself on the roof. No, this was something larger. Far larger. The only creature her mind could conjure up to fit the paws above _and_ find itself on the roof was a large feline, trotting about in search of its next target. The only cat she could think of that stalked about with its claws out was a Cheetah, stealthy and lethal. Nothing she wanted to toy with.

She recalled her father's words, repeated on many an occasion, warning her to stay quiet and out of sight of creatures skulking about on the roof. There was no reason for her to step outside and take a look; it would be all the more straightforward for them to ambush her from above, or at the very least take a panicked swipe at her if she startled them. _Don't be an easy meal, Ellie._

_Click. Click. Click._

_Scrape._

There was no cat alive that could pry at fixtures with such pointed determination. Both eyes flew open.

This was not her father's caravan.

Adrenaline flooded her system with a discernable _thud_ once again; arms and legs electrified, heart in her throat, she silently scrambled to her feet and padded through the black of night, the cold, shiny floor sending chills through her bare feet and into her bones.

The Engineer was huddled on his side and snoring softly, one arm drooping over the edge of the couch with the other cradling his head, both legs curled to fit within the confines of the couch. With her pulse pounding in her ears, she reached with one cold, clammy hand to grasp as the sinew of the huge, porcelain forearm dangling just above the floor, unsure if he could even feel the contact underneath the biosuit.

_Skitter skitter skitter skitter skitter._

Involuntarily, her grip tightened. The snores ceased. As she desperately searched his features for signs of life, he finally peeked one black eye open, squinting in the darkness. She was somewhat certain he was looking at her, and somewhat more certain he wasn't in the slightest bit amused.

_Scraaaaaaaaaaape._

In an instant, both dark eyes snapped open as he baulked in realisation. In another he was half-seated on the couch, half-crouched ready to burst from his position. Mouth agape, his gaze darted about every inch of the room as the noises yielded to silence once more; finally, that gaze caught hers. Wider than she'd ever seen them, there was something in the black of his eyes that she didn't want to see, that she'd never seen in him.

Fear. It was fear.

Reaching up to grip her shoulder with one hand, he placed the extended index finger of the other against his lips, his gaze refusing to leave hers. She hoped it meant the same to his people as it did hers, and offered a solemn, terrified nod as she sucked in her bottom lip.

In the next breath he had crossed the room with both speed and silence that she had never dreamed possible for a creature of his size. The moment he reached the crates, he reached down with both hands and snatched the immense, rifle-like contraption he'd brought on board, slinging the strap of one over his shoulder as he marched back toward her.

The word he whispered to her as he crouched in front of her was meaningless, but the sheer intent etched into his pale face was not.

They were no longer alone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note:
> 
> HEY GUESS WHAT STUFF IS HAPPENING.
> 
> Also, yeah. The ~60 hour weeks continue. At least the upshot is soon I'll be buying a new machine with this blood-money that'll allow me to write this all in far more stimulating environments.
> 
> I'll probably revisit the Shaw-David dialogue at a later date. It's not come together quite as I want it given it's taken twice as long to get this chapter out and it's been in several hundred word snippets at any given time rather than my bulk sit-down-and-work periods. But hey, that's what postscript is all about, amirite. This story is going to get a massive spitshine as I write Za'il's version of events.
> 
> Next one will probably be about as far away too, I'm afraid. Another several weeks of bedlam in meatspace...


	13. Tribute

The scratching and scuffling had been absent for far longer than she'd liked. Silence was no way to identify the location of unseen monsters in the abyss of night.

There was a familiar expression etched into the Engineer's visage, grim and twisted in determination; with all the strange places she had found herself throughout her early life, she'd had the dubious honour of seeing that same expression burned into the faces of soldiers amid crises, marching up and down the dusty paths of half-abandoned, ruined towns in heavy armour and laden with weapons, eyes drinking in the most minute of movements as fingers lingered over triggers. For a brief moment, her mind could not distinguish between those Human soldiers and the pale-skinned alien, his stance broad and deliberate as he silently stalked about the ship a mirror of moments of conflict interspersed throughout her unusual childhood.

Wherever her mind had taken her in that brief, reflective spell, it hadn't registered that she was one with the present; her breath hitched in her throat as she realised he was standing right in front of her, handing her one of the lifeboat's flamethrower units. Scrambling for composure, her shaking hands grasped the weapon. The strap dug into her shoulder as she slung it across, her hand fumbling with the trigger.

_Bang!_

Blunt force yielded to a horrifying _screech_ as something slammed against the vessel's hull from below; both pairs of eyes snapped toward the medbay, following the source of the sound as it trailed off, its remnants echoing against Elizabeth's ears as she fought for breath. Whatever was out there was _big_.

The sound of bending, crumpling steel followed soon after, sending faint oscillations underfoot as something, something in the vicinity of the engines, was torn away from the vessel. With an almighty, clattering _crash_ , silence once again fell upon the darkened room, the sound of her own laboured breath hoarse in her throat. Her hands tingled. Her legs were coiled springs.

It was truly remarkable how silently the immense Engineer moved. His feet barely made a sound against the polished floor as, wide-eyed, he disappeared across the foyer and into the bedroom in somewhat of a determined crouch. His finger never left the trigger of his weapon, held erect in one hand as the other quietly pried at the bulkheads, checking anything that could pass as an entrance, tracing the walls one after another where they had noticed weaknesses in the hull during their last reconnaissance mission.

Her own bare toes gripping the cold floor, Elizabeth found herself holding her breath as she crept toward the windows beside the couches, picking at every single detail that showed beneath the nighttime haze from the Gas Giant beyond. Nothing about the purple-hued landscape seemed amiss – for a barren wasteland of rocks and debris. She knew it was hopeless; anything out there would see better than she did in the dark, and would undoubtedly avoid standing in plain sight.

A faint _clatter-clatter_ echoed between the base of the hull and the rocks below – it suggested the chatter of bones, or enormous claws. There was little doubt it was the latter, scratching about from a similar location below them that had yielded the almighty crash from earlier. The Engineer's gaze remained on the source of the sound beneath them as he stalked past, swapping the rifle to his left hand as he crouched beside the coffee table to carefully, tentatively shuffle through the growing stack of used, scribbled-on pages of paper strewn throughout its surface.

Shaw followed, casting a glance toward the airlock as she padded closer. He had located his earlier illustrations of the insectoid monstrosities, pausing to make lingering, intense eye contact with her as he pushed the page toward her; drawing a breath, he plucked a pen from the table, then hastily scribbled a message on the base of the page before flipping to a fresh leaf and hurriedly penning what quickly became more of a letter than a mere note. Every few lines he would pause, stock-still as he examined every corner of the room, then resume with renewed determination.

Even in the dark, with little ambient light, she managed to quickly translate his first message.

_If I don't kill it, it will kill both of us. These are instructions for reaching your ship if I can't escort you._

She became aware that her jaw was hanging slack. He wasn't... _no_ , he couldn't. She searched his face for anything that belied humour, hoping he didn't just suggest he would _sacrifice himself_ for her sake; she was met with a grim stare, lips pursed thin below fearful eyes.

Shaking her head, she quietly snatched the page from him and flipped it to a fresh page. She knew she'd written the question before, but it warranted reiteration.

_What kills them?_

His response was short, passing the page back to her as he stood.

_Heavy weapons and fire. Yours won't do much damage._

Surely, surely, there must be a better way of dealing with the threat than one of them risking death; she knew he was strong, far stronger than her, but if these _things_ were anything like the tentacled horror that had almost killed him, there was little to be gained by facing it head-on. Besides, what was there to do? Open the door, let it in and gun it down as it came screaming aboard? Leap out and hunt it down the old-fashioned way?

Her heart sank. Rifle gripped with both hands, he was slowly, stiffly making his way toward the airlock.

She knew what would happen; she'd seen it before. The hunter, stepping out into the dark to take care of a threat to everyone else in the vicinity, doing what needed to be done to ensure the safety of others – invariably that threat was in and of itself something far nastier, faced off with weapons as the only line of defense. The moment he stepped outside, there was little doubt he would instantly become prey.

"No," she whispered hoarsely as she scrambled to her feet, one hand desperately reaching for him.

The Engineer turned on a heel, raising his left index finger to his lips in an effort to quieten her. Instead, she beckoned with both hands, shaking her head; she couldn't be a party to this folly.

Casting her an incredulous squint, he kept the rifle trained on the airlock as he turned toward her. Shaw grabbed at the pad as quietly as she could, her eyes refusing to break contact until she found herself thumbing at the note he'd just written, urgency returning to her in light of what was effectively a suicide note.

There was no time to play the translation game.

Elizabeth was no artist. In fact, she was hardly a _creative_ at all. With the exception of music and daydreaming, her forays into any kind of art had been negligible, relegated to recreating symbols and site maps where necessary and little more, foregoing the paintbrush and exchanging it for far more practical ones designed for unearthing artefacts and ancient secrets alike. It left her hideously unprepared for this moment where, under pressure, she would need to somehow leverage what little skill she had for her point to have any hope of being understood.

The pen faltered as her shaking fingers pressed it against the pad.

Outline after outline fell into an approximation of their respective places, hurriedly and awkwardly forming what perhaps passed as the rear of the vessel, airlock doors parted with two stick-figure forms standing on the platform beyond. The larger held a weapon. Above the stick figures, hunched on the roof, she scribbled something large and bug-like, staggering into questionable territory as she reached the limits of her imagination; its form was beside the point, she knew he had far more of an idea as to what was out there than her.

The point, as it stood, was the arrow drawn between the creature and the gun-slinging stick figure.

She watched as he scowled at the sketch in the near-darkness, sucking in his bottom lip with grim concession; her stomach twisted as he simply handed the pad back, offering what was far more a grimace than the reassuring smile she _knew_ he intended.

"No," she shot again, barely above a whisper. Her fingers grabbed at the immense, pale digits of his left hand as he tried to turn toward the door again, a ferocity forming on her face that she hadn't a hope of mirroring within. Lips parted as he wrestled with just _what_ he would retort with, he gently tugged his hand away–

_BANG._

A bone-jarring _screech_ followed the resounding blow against the airlock. Both Human and Engineer flinched violently, with both the rifle and flamethrower immediately trained on the doors; a distant _hiss_ echoed through the night moments later, claws scrabbling at the seam between the panels. Shaw's breath froze in her throat. Za'il had forced entry in exactly the same way. It had, in his case, proven trivial.

_Bang. Hiss._

Metallic blunt force echoed about the deck as claws paced about the platform outside, paused, then with a high-pitched, tooth-twisting _scrape_ of sharp points against alloy, faded to the faint _patter-patter_ of broad strides against the dirt beyond.

The hammering of her own heartbeat in her throat rang against the static hush in the room. There was little doubt in her mind that should either of them step outside, they would die swiftly and horribly.

Switching the flamethrower for the pen, pad and tablet, Elizabeth hunched against the arm of the couch as she scrabbled about the furthest vestiges of her mind for a safer resolution than marching to their deaths. They had an _entire vessel_ at their disposal, surely there was an alternative to gunning the monstrosity down.

The thought ricocheted about her mind for a lingering moment – an _entire vessel_ at their disposal, and they were running about it like rats in a maze.

_Could we crush it? Could we fly away?_

Surely either option would be almost as effective as weapons and flames. At the very least, perhaps either option may serve to prompt the pale giant into a less...military resolution.

Fingers still gripping the enormous weapon, he stared blankly at her scrawl for a painful moment, eyes unseeing as they darted between the lexicons in the dark. Though, she admitted, it was too dark to presume what he was thinking, or if he was at all; even his features were obscured by the night.

Out of nowhere, a deep gasp erupted from his chest. The rifle swung free against its strap by his waist as he snatched the pen from the couch's arm, eyes wide as he set about frantically scrawling a response…

...then stopped dead, briefly examining her startled, expectant gawp before hastily scratching it out and opting for long, sweeping lines, much as she had earlier.

After pausing twice throughout his sketching to pry at the silence hanging thick in the night, fingers reaching for his weapon each time, he finally handed the pad back to her with an intensity in his eyes that had, by now, begun to grow familiar.

His sketch was less ambiguous than her own, that much was undeniable. She immediately recognised the plan view of the vessel's belly, complete with the shattered nacelle on the port side; the creature stalking the shadows outside was readily apparent too, crouched beneath one of the hull-mounted engines amongst billowing, radiating pen lines. He had taken apparent creative license in drawing the pillars of flame from all four engines and the three remaining nacelles, though it was still perfectly clear what he intended. How had he whipped that up so quickly?

And what were those radiating lines?

_Heavy weapons and fire_ , her mind churned over and over, looping back and forth over the translation in the distant purple glow of the Gas Giant. _Heavy weapons and..._

The beast was _on fire_.

It was all she could do to get an enthusiastic nod in before he had turned to sprint silently across the room, swinging the rifle in front of him as he crammed his shoulders into the narrow stairwell leading to the cockpit. She followed as quickly as she could, clutching the pen, paper and tablet as she rushed up the stairs on tiptoes, unable to keep pace as the immense creature wrestled with the narrow passageway and forced his way into the cramped, Human-sized cockpit with an energetic huff.

He had already begun prepping the ship's systems by the time she leapt into the copilot's chair, panel after panel heaving to life in a rainbow of light that was blessedly dimmed for night-time operations; she had no idea how to fly the blasted thing, even after the day's earlier demonstration, but she _knew_ she had to help _somehow_ ; their survival was too important, and too much in peril, to simply sit around.

_Where is the damned creature, anyway?_

Her hands darted toward the controls before she'd finished forming that thought; she had the power to answer that question. There was an almost imperceptible pause in Za'il's haphazard tinkering as he silently observed her stabbing at the sensor interface in determined, sweeping strokes; his gaze didn't linger long, given her side of the console remained unlabelled, and hurriedly returned to preparing the vessel for flight.

A faint _blip_ echoed about the cockpit as rings and rivers of yellow lines burped across the centre of the console, highlighting the terrain below them in relief. For several square kilometres sharp ripples of rocks littered the land in loops of gold, flattened only in the path of the enormous crashed ship outside and otherwise strikingly uniform in its staccato smatterings of material. She let out a long, tense sigh as the yellow lines seared into her vision. Too good to be true – it would be impossible to spot a living creature with such low fidelity–

A ripple of movement fluttered amongst stagnant arcs.

Both pairs of eyes immediately fell upon it; it was but a mere blip amongst the detail, but once seen, forever it remained.

Za'il's finger lingered over the thruster controls as they watched, intently, for another sign of movement. The creature was lingering between the two starboard-side engines, writhing closer and closer to the stern. Elizabeth tapped one index finger against the rear-most of the starboard engines, their white outlines almost obscuring the creature as it moved again with a burst of momentum, distorting the terrain as little more than a flutter amongst the lines. Za'il offered a solemn nod. Judging by his expression, he was holding his breath as much as she was.

A distant _scree_ of claws against sheet metal echoed about the deck below as the blip suddenly surged below the rear-most engine. In a heartbeat, the Engineer's fingers hit the console and slid upward; the rumbling, bassy thrum of heat flooding the engines followed in the next instant. Plumes of thick dust coughed upward from the terrain beneath the lifeboat, staining the purple-hued night a grey-brown and obscuring the landscape beyond as the vessel lurched upward and slowly, terrifyingly, to port.

_One, two, three, four,_ she counted, breath caught in her throat. _Four_ , then as quickly as it had begun, it came to an end; both hands wrestling the console, the Engineer set about throttling back and setting the vessel back against its landing gear with as much grace as his shaking fingers could muster. Two soft _thuds_ quickly ensued as it returned to the moon; clammy hands gripped the seat bolsters as the first threw her left, the final jarring her right. Two more crashes of shattered glass downstairs followed in the aftermath. She would worry about it when daylight came.

While night remained, she would focus on whatever had been trying to gain access to the vessel. Snatching a gasp for air, she set about trying to discern the shifting rubble from the larger blip that had taken to tearing the engines to ribbons. Nothing its shape appeared to be moving amongst the smaller displaced rocks near the vessel. Nothing its size remained even close to where the engines hung.

Had it been incinerated?

Shutdown happened swiftly and in mere approximation to any sort of order; the console lights hadn't even faded by the time Za'il was on his feet, snatching his weapon from the deck and clutching it to his chest as he darted toward the staircase. Shaw was mere paces behind as she followed suit, pen and pad in hand.

David had shifted during the impromptu takeoff and landing, but not by much; half his body was now underneath the piano, head cocked to the side as it met one of the instrument's legs. Another thing that could wait until morning.

Mere seconds of stalking about the deck took place before a throaty gasp hitched in the Engineer's chest. Elizabeth's eyes followed his as they seized toward the floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear of the vessel, staring at a stab of light in startling orange against the night.

Flames. There were flames in the abyss.

Fists balled, palms cold and sweating, she paced closer to the window, lingering by the couch as her eyes struggled to focus. The blaze cast a ring of light against the rocky landscape, flickering with obvious heat as it consumed its fuel, stinging her eyes as they grappled with the brightness amongst the black.

The fuel twitched. Limbs groped at the ground, hunched on all fours, shuddering with one final burst of desperate movement before collapsing, succumbing to the blaze and crumpling into a searing, horrifyingly humanoid, defeated heap.

In the distant vestiges of her memory, the telltale, hissing rasp of a flamethrower clawed at her psyche. She had seen this before. She had seen this before, and she was seeing it again, and…

_Charlie._

His final words clawed at her soul, clamping down on her throat, choking the air from her lungs.

_Charlie._

She couldn't be sure where the scream had come from; it felt so real, but it was most certainly from memory – recent memory, but it seemed like so long ago.

The slumped figure outside burned against her. Nothing but black surrounded it, consuming her as she replayed, over and over, the writhing end of a man's life, a Human effigy to the failure of _Prometheus_. More screams followed, raking her flesh; her own words, begging and pleading for mercy, begging for sanity, echoing in her ears over the howl of the flamethrower.

She was distantly aware of a deep, booming voice speaking to her above the hubris. It was incomprehensible; all she could hear was the chaos unfolding before her. Vickers ordering Charlie to stay back. Charlie urging her, daring her, challenging her to follow through. The shouts of her crewmates. Her own screams.

Her hands darted forward, reaching for the corpse beyond. She would do anything to save him, to take his place, suffer his torment so he could live. The strong, impossibly strong hands of her crewmates snatched at both arms as she surged forward, scrambling toward her husband's fallen body, fighting against their grasp with every ounce of strength left in her battered, exhausted body.

_Charlie._

By now she was aware she _was_ screaming; her throat was raw, the cold air burning her lungs as her voice cracked, choking on the flood of tears that followed.

The blazing body before her was still; it was over, she was too late. Over and over, she was too late. The flames had finished what the infestation had started, and she was, finally, alone.

With one final, desperate lunge toward the fire, her legs lost all cohesion and she crumpled to the deck as thick, suffocating sobs burst forth in fitful screams that sounded oddly alien to her ears. Her body fading to numb lifelessness, she felt for an ethereal moment that she was simply watching all of this unfold from elsewhere, standing back and silently watching as she collapsed to the planet's surface mere inches from the _Prometheus'_ loading door, bent and broken before the smouldering body of her beloved. What a wretched sight.

Darkness engulfed her as her forehead pressed against cold, hard polymer.

And still, and yet, strong hands clung to her arms as she lingered in the void.

_Charlie._

By now only choked, sobbing whispers made it past her lips. She would live in this moment forever, doomed to repeat the flames, eternally stuck on this foetid world metres from salvation.

_Lee-zuh-beh._

Amongst the burning silence beyond her torment, his voice seemed distorted and foreign. Had he somehow survived the flames? Surely not. And yet, and yet – he had called for her. With every fibre of her being drained, she pushed forward with what little was left and raised her head toward him.

The smouldering corpse was slowly being consumed by the ebbing flames.

Another entirely foreign noise escaped her as she collapsed back down into the abyss.

_Lee-zuh-beh._

That was not Charlie.

Deep and alien, the awkward fumbling with the syllables of her name was nothing like the voice of her late husband – and yet, it was strangely familiar. Familiar enough that–

This was not the surface of the planet she was gripping with both hands.

The hands around her biceps, cautiously shaking her to her senses, were much, _much_ too large to be Human.

Breath catching in her abused, wrecked throat, her body fell limp as she twisted her head to the side and gazed upward through the haze of tears. Reality returned with a discernable _thud_ ; illuminated by the flickering flames beyond, the darkened main room of the lifeboat was devoid of any movement apart from the steady rise and fall of the immense chest above her. The Engineer had followed her as she'd fallen, crouched on his knees and hunched over her as he gently, gingerly cradled her arms. What little she could make out of his face was the picture of concern, clearly as confused as he was worried by her sudden, inexplicable outburst.

While the tears had not stopped for a moment since they started, this newfound grasp on the present wrenched them from her with renewed fervour. He murmured something in hushed tones, handling her limp body as though she were made of glass as he pulled her from the floor.

Charlie was dead, and she was _still_ alone on this godforsaken rock with an oversized alien and a beheaded android as company.

She was vaguely aware that her sobs sounded more like choked screams as he slowly, delicately set her against her knees. He needn't have bothered; she crumpled against his grasp the moment he tried to right her.

_Charlie._

His name escaped her one final time as she descended into the abyss of the _Prometheus'_ aftermath; before she knew it she had grabbed handfuls of something, _anything_ , sobbing into the solid surface she found herself pressing her face against. She howled as she collapsed against her hands, clinging to the warmth before her, fingers prying at the sinew they'd looped around as time swallowed her whole.

An eternity seemed to pass before two huge, warm hands tentatively grasped her quaking frame – but her concept of time was, by now, completely shattered. It could have been mere seconds, or it could have been hours. Regardless, the hand against the small of her back easily spanned her width; the other encompassed her from her spine to her shoulder. Distantly, it left her realising just how _bloody cold_ she was, the clammy, gooseflesh skin of her shoulder twitching against the heat of his fingers.

With time an unknown quantity by now, her mind oscillating between fervent, frantic replays of one disaster after the next and deafening, absolute _nothing_ , she had become one with the horrifying noises escaping her chattering jaw. Slowly, as the orange flickers in the room faded to a dull red and finally, glacially succumbed to the dull purple tainting the sky beyond, she became aware that the smooth surface in her grip was the lowest rib of the Engineer's biosuit, and it was his chest her face was pressed against as she knelt, cowering, between his knees.

There was something strangely soothing about the air in the lifeboat; warm and familiar, yet equally as alien, the scent sought to gradually slow the spinning wheels in her mind, sopping up the pain it chose to drown in and instead enveloping it with an ethereal salve that battled the darkness tooth and claw. As time scraped on the sensation had begun to soak into every inch of her being, flooding her with a sense of comfort and warmth that seemed wholly inappropriate for the trauma that had befallen her from the moment she'd set her eyes on the burning monster outside. By now her eyes were almost swollen shut, her mouth dry as the sobs had faded to reflexive whimpers as her diaphragm spasmed in her gut, and the spinning, surging mass of memories in her mind had fizzled into stagnant, cold realisation of the moment she stood in right here, right now.

Drawing a shaky breath, she finally sat back against her ankles as she pawed at her puffy, inflamed face with one sweaty hand. Two enormous hand-shaped patches of warmth on her back bucked against the cold as the giant released her from his grasp, instead reaching for her shoulders as she sat upright. Through the haze of her abused vision, it seemed his expression had changed little; as worried as he was before her inevitable collapse, it seemed he had, at least, patiently waited for her to cry it out.

In that moment, she remembered it wasn't the first time one of them had fallen apart at the seams aboard this vessel.

He had offered her an explanation when he'd returned to the lifeboat in a similar state. She realised he ought to offer him the same.

Fumbling for the pen and pad still sitting against the arm of the couch quickly proved useless; her coordination was, at this point, completely shot.

As soon as she'd managed to bat both items onto the floor, the hands gently cradling her shoulders instead shifted to pick her up off the floor and place her on the couch. A whimper escaped her as her knees and hips protested; just how long had she been hunched against him, wailing?

Ringing, thick and persistent, had begun to displace the fog in her mind as the Engineer placed the pen, paper and tablet in front of her on the coffee table then knelt back down against his knees beside her. There was a patient, reserved air about the expectant look he cast her. Distantly, it reminded her of the expression she'd cast him as he crumpled against the glass metres away only days earlier.

Her fingers rattled too violently to grip the pen, no matter how hard she tried to still them. After several noisy attempts amongst breathy whimpers, she abandoned the idea of scratching any meaningful information against the abused pad and instead briefly turned her attention toward the tablet, fingertips fumbling with the glossy surface before realising that her overtaxed, swollen corneas simply wouldn't allow her to see clearly enough to discern text anyway.

Bloody useless.

She had thought, until that moment, that she'd cried herself dry, that she'd wrung out every bit of what she had to give and finally, finally descended into the clammy, ringing numbness that followed the crippling throes of dissociative grief. She thought it had been brought to a close, heralding the return of normalcy in any form – but the mere reminder of her own uselessness, alone and at the universe's mercy, brought a choked, wet whimper from subterranean depths she was previously unaware of.

Rather than any semblance of an answer, the Engineer would have to make do with a single word. One last time, his name escaped her. _Charlie._

Once again she found herself watching from afar as her body succumbed to wracked sobs, buckling against the shoulder alongside her as she twisted to grab at whatever fell within reach. A soft sigh followed to her right a moment later, followed by the familiar warmth of a hand resting against her opposite shoulder, drawing her closer with a torque that seemed not quite Human.

Her face hurt, _God_ it hurt; her chest spasmed above a churning, twitching stomach, both protesting her descent back into choked whimpers for the umpteenth time this evening. The very last vestiges of rationality lingering in the back of her aching head had long since had enough of this folly; it was exhausting, utterly exhausting, and so _pointless_ – it was done and gone; this achieved nothing.

That exhaustion had long since twisted at her bones, sapping what little remained of her cohesion as she slumped heavily against the body beside her, limbs falling limp against strong arms as her eyes refused to stay open a second longer.

It was the loneliness that would kill her, she decided. Stripped bare to the whims of fate, there was nothing standing between her and the void.

Nothing, that is, apart from the steel bands enveloping her, cradling her before the event horizon.

* * *

There was nothing quite like waking up with a mouth like the Sahara and a head that pounded hard enough to _make noise_ with each pulse.

Searing yellow clawed at her vision as she winced away from the morning light, blinking away the thick crust that all but sealed her swollen eyes shut. Her chest spasmed as she stole a deep yawn; it caught in her throat, briefly leaving her choking and spluttering into the pillow clutched between her arms. Opposite, a soft, incomprehensible mumble followed.

Gripping the pillow with one hand, she arched upward from it as she forced her eyes to comply, squinting through the amber haze. Finally cooperating, her vision focused on the couch opposite; still dozing, the Engineer lay slumped across the entirety of its confines, legs tucked awkwardly against one end as one arm draped toward the floor by the other. He was in almost exactly the same position as she'd found him last night as she shook him awake, only he was facing the opposite way.

Another yawn erupted from her. _Shook him awake?_

Scowling as she fumbled with the heavy duvet enveloping her, she fished through the jumbled molasses clogging her mind; _had last night actually happened?_

The room around her was in a _state_. Half of the clutter on the table had been knocked onto the floor, and there were fresh scribbles across multiple sheets of paper that hadn't been there before she went to bed. More books had flown off their shelves and several bottles had detonated against the polished floor opposite and, on further inspection, David appeared to have migrated under the piano. It all seemed consistent with the previous rough landing – perhaps the horrifying patchwork of half-formed memories strung together with smatterings of incomprehensible grief _hadn't_ been a dream.

Refusing to give those thoughts purchase, preferring to leave them behind in the night in which they'd formed, she instead focused on the mystery of the blankets she was presently tangled in. Of all the things that had happened last night, she had absolutely no memory of curling up on the couch. When had she dragged the duvet out here? Why wasn't she in bed where she'd put herself after sorting out David?

And why did this pillow smell _so damned delicious_?

Whatever. Falling apart aside, she had a job to do – the sooner she left this place the better, although she was even less sure of where she was headed next than she was before the nightmare that last night had been.

Forcing herself to her feet, she indulged yet another yawn as she leaned backward, popping one joint after another along her spine before seeing to her stiff, sleep-addled neck in a similar fashion. _Speaking of David…_

After a brief circuit of the freshly cluttered room, she knelt beside the android and set about hunting for the hidden switch he'd mentioned hours earlier. Below his right ear, he'd said, but _where_? Probing about with the fingertips of her left hand as she crouched over him, she sought to cover as much of the pseudo-skin in the area as she could in an effort to find–

Silver eyes snapped open without warning beneath her. "Good morning, Doctor."

Squeaking, she recoiled in surprise, clutching both hands against her chest. Behind her, the creak of solid panels against leather preceded a mighty, deep yawn.

David's expression was briefly pleased, almost smug, until he stole a moment to observe her; immediately, his smirk twisted into something resembling concern. "Elizabeth, are you alright?"

"I…" she began, unsure whether the lie would pass muster. She hesitated, quickly running a handful of options through her coffee-deprived mind, before settling on less of a lie with a sad smile. "I'll be alright."

The android frowned, pale gaze refusing to leave her. "What happened?" The pause that lingered between them was almost _too_ perfectly-timed. "Did he hurt you?"

"What?" Her eyebrows shot up with genuine surprise; casting a quick glance over her shoulder, she noted the creature in question had pushed himself into somewhat of a dazed seated position, pawing at his eyes with one hand as he gripped the couch with the other. _Why had he assumed that?_ She returned her attention to the android with a scowl. "No, of course not."

Another perfectly-timed pause. "Something happened last night, Doctor."

"Something did happen, David," she mused with a sigh. "We had an uninvited guest. We're probably going to have to review our plans and get the _Hell_ off this planet with haste. It's been a long night. I need a shower. Za'il can probably fill you in. Sorry to wake you and run, but he's more coherent than me right now." The Engineer flinched upon hearing his name as she pushed herself to her feet.

"If you say so, Doctor – but I doubt he's any fonder of me this morning than he was last night…" he trailed off as she sauntered toward the bedroom, clawing at the matted mess on her head with both hands. He feigned a sigh. "Wonderful."

Silence was never _entirely_ silent to David; while the Engineer predictably said not one thing as Elizabeth slid the bedroom and bathroom doors shut behind her, he could hear the immense creature rustling about behind him. At the very edge of his vision, he noticed him folding the blankets on the couch he presumed Elizabeth had slept on; on the other side of the wall, the _hiss_ of water flooding the ship's pipes preceded the clatter of water falling several metres from the shower-rose to the floor.

The Engineer completely ignored the android as he stretched, then paced toward the bar, fishing a clean glass from the dishwasher and filling it with water. Without Shaw as a buffer, it occurred to him that misfortune might once again befall him; regardless, there were questions that needed to be answered.

Clearing his throat, he slipped from English to the one language he had confirmed was mutual. "Good morning."

The Engineer stiffened, glass freezing halfway to his lips. He released a sigh, responding with what almost passed as a growl. "Is it, though?"

"It's a turn of phrase," David mused cheerfully, though his smile faded as he paused. "I suppose in light of last night, it may not be."

"Not exactly, no." Za'il's disinterest was palpable, alien or no.

"May I ask what happened?"

The Engineer shot him an irritated scowl, ripples of sinew forming along his cheeks as his jaw tensed. He seemed to consider his answer for a fair length of time; David was unsure whether it was a struggle to articulate the events, or whether he was struggling to tolerate him. "I'm working with the assumption that creatures have overrun this moon – or _had_ , at least. You wouldn't have encountered them. No one would be alive to speak of it. Needless to say, one of them tried to gain access to this ship last night." He lingered on that thought for a moment, pausing to half-drain the glass still pinched between his fingers. "Explains why the doors of my ship were all sealed shut, in retrospect."

"I assume it was unsuccessful," the android quipped, aware he was stating the obvious.

The Engineer offered a singular nod. "Thankfully."

Had he not been synthetic, flesh-and-blood rather than a feat of programming, he might have found the ensuing silence uncomfortable. It had long been obvious he would have to initiate any conversation between himself and the mighty alien. "May I ask – what's the matter with Elizabeth?"

There was a subtle shift in the creature's expression that was not lost on David – again. The moment he mentioned her name, irritation almost completely yielded to something far closer approximating worry. "I don't know. She couldn't tell me." He drew a sigh, shifting his weight against the counter; inhuman as it was, his voice became far softer as he, David imagined, sifted through the events of last night. "She broke down, well and truly – I've seen it happen before, in others, but this was _extreme_. She was _traumatised_. Inconsolable. It must have been an hour, perhaps longer, before I could even get her off the floor. She just kept repeating the same word, over and over…"

A scowl had formed on David's face; he, too, had seen similar. He had a hunch. "May I ask what that word was?"

"I don't know," he shot. "I can't speak her language, remember?"

"What did it sound like?" The android's patient demeanour never faltered.

Za'il drew a breath, pressing his eyes closed momentarily. "It sounded like... _chah-lee_. Or something. I don't know."

The faintest hint of a knowing grin fell upon his face. "Charlie. That would be Dr Holloway."

Something twisted in the Engineer's expression; realisation, perhaps, David considered. Several thoughts seemed to appear then fade before he gathered his thoughts. "Someone important to her?"

The grin found further form. "Charlie was her husband."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been a while. So those long weeks? Totally got worse. Sorry for leaving everyone on that horrid cliffhanger.
> 
> Also sorry for munting our protagonist. As consolation, have some dialogue from the Engineer after all this time!


	14. Doctrine

Closing her eyes had become a very risky game, indeed. Flames, blistering flames were etched into her eyelids, searing her cheeks the moment they fell closed and drawing her back in, into the abyss that seemed destined to swallow her whole.

The scientist within had long since grown tired of the persistent breakdowns, its patience finally extinguished in the aftermath of last night's shenanigans. Drawing a deep, rattling breath, Elizabeth set about stripping herself of her clothing with deliberate, mechanical movements as she fixed her swollen, heavy eyes on whatever lay immediately before her; she needed to gain focus and start putting one foot in front of the other if she intended to escape this Hell. Allowing herself to mope like this was the antithesis of progress.

Thrusting aside the last of her clothing with violence befitting of the growing anger in the pit of her stomach, she punched the shower console with the side of her fist and strode under the cool, pounding droplets the moment they began falling from the ceiling.

A shiver hard enough to choke the air from her lungs erupted from her; whoever was in here last had set it _bloody cold_.

Naturally, she knew _exactly_ who had been in here last. He'd left it absurdly cold last time, too.

Having fiddled briefly with the temperature, she reached toward the wall with both hands, gripping the slick surface with the tips of her fingers as the raindrops beat against her skin, the heat hammering at her stiff, borderline cramped muscles as her gaze lay fixed on the surface before her. Sweat-tainted trails of water eventually found their way from her head and into her eyes, much to her irritation; merely blinking them away, her gaze remained between her hands below a heavy scowl.

It's not like she didn't have _plenty_ of reasons to feel so sorry for herself, present pounding headache notwithstanding. It was readily apparent that she'd lost everything, _everything_ , and had only begun to come to terms with it as she watched their intruder burn and her mind did... _whatever the fuck_ it had decided to do last night. There was little left intact of her memories of the last day – just gelatinous piecemeal floating about in the void, refusing to be strung together in any coherent pattern. They merely bobbed past, adhering to her psyche in dribs and drabs, offering glimmers of clarity before snatching to the next moment and jarring her grasp on them free.

For all intents and purposes, she _had_ been transported back in time. She _had_ , for an indecipherable eternity, howled at the door of the _Prometheus_ until Za'il had, in the most literal of ways, dragged her back to reality kicking and screaming. By her arms. As if she were a sack of potatoes.

The lingering anger staining her thoughts refused to acknowledge that he'd allowed her to cling to him for an indeterminate period of time, sobbing until she was dry-retching, then clinging for yet longer, violating his personal space as she fought the endless tide of a cacophony of thoughts. The anger, the misguided, misdirected anger wouldn't allow her to recall for more than a second how he'd clung back, warm hands steadying her against the event horizon, refusing to let her lose her mind against the cold, polished floor.

He had wordlessly, silently tended to her in the throes of misery, and she couldn't ignore that forever.

As much as she was loathe to admit it, what she _still_ needed to do was to talk it out with someone – preferably someone who understood, particularly someone that had _been there_. What a twist of fate that there were no other Humans left alive in the mission's aftermath, not one single soul to confide in who had a chance of understanding _any_ of the thoughts that raced through her mind with the persistence of the monsters that wrought them in the first place. It's not like she was picky at this point; heck, in the absence of Charlie, she would have taken anyone bar Weyland himself. Janek, Ford, even Vickers in her infinite, sour hostility. Simply airing it out would do so much, _so much_ , for the last shreds of her sanity.

Instead, she was left with an android head that spoke words but didn't understand the Human condition, and an alien that, as much as she could tell, understood _enough_ of the Human condition – or, perhaps just that of sentient, organic life – but spoke not a word. God was mocking her, and unfortunately, she had a few leads as to why.

She scowled deeper as she entertained the idea of what would happen if she told David any of that. He, too, had mocked her for her beliefs; oscillating between believing it to be mechanical innocence and fearing it was something far more malevolent left her head spinning. A lifeform programmed in such a manner would only ever see logic; she knew he simply lacked the nuance to believe. Though, with a creator like Weyland, she hardly blamed him. He could at least be more polite about it.

Instead, she decided to entertain the second option; what did the Engineer believe?

_Scratch that,_ she mused with a grumpy sigh. _He was explosive enough about the mere suggestion of creators._

The question had loomed in the back of her mind, forming as a niggle over time and finally prying at her consciousness soon after exploring the planet; what was God's place in all of this? If they were created by the Engineers, who created _them_? What did it mean for the last vestiges of her own beliefs?

Even Charlie had tried to untangle the questions from her fingers aboard the _Prometheus_ , but there was no stopping them – not then, not now, not _ever_.

In any other circumstance, she would have _loved_ to sit down with Za'il, ask all her questions, and be humbled by the answers. It was strange; despite all that had happened in the past week, despite all she'd learned about the planet, its people, the horrors that befell it, and its last survivor himself, there was still a tinge of romance about the idea of gleaning pure knowledge from a greater being, learning about her place in the universe and discovering what came before them.

In reality, Za'il was a soldier – an impatient, temperamental one at that. He had no answers for her, and no apparent desire to provide them if he did.

To be fair, right now she would settle with simply stating _everything hurts_ and banking a good, solid hug. No questions, no answers, no politics and no walking on eggshells...just a sliver of contact.

_Stop it, Elizabeth._

She drew a deep breath and released it with a mighty huff as her fingertips gripped the wall with increasing force. She had no business invading the personal space of _aliens_ she'd only just met – let alone aliens whom she was constantly inventing new ways of offending and insulting, and least of all aliens whose lives she had invariably altered the course of indefinitely.

It was hardly worth musing what _he_ thought of that notion. Seeing the giant creature bent and broken before the window for what must have been hours, alternating between bouts of half-strangled sobbing and rigid catatonia, told her all she needed to know. _Ruined_ was likely more accurate than merely _altered_ ; she knew so little about the giant in the next room, and the more she thought about it the less she realised she knew at all, but it didn't take an awful lot of imagination to realise what had been stripped from him.

She had lost her husband, her crew. Doubtless she had lost any semblance of a career, and she was likely never setting for on Earth again, when she thought about it – but he had lost _aeons_. The rest, all that she had been stripped of, was mere static by comparison.

_Everything_ her arse.

Shaw bit down on her lower lip, eyes still trained on the wall before her. Frankly, in comparison, she still had plenty; she _knew_ what awaited her should she indulge the luxury of returning to her home planet, but standing amongst the desolate ruins of this one, it was obvious he was not guaranteed that same certainty. If anything, he was likely guaranteed the opposite.

And here she was, feeling sorry for herself.

She wondered, idly, just how _he_ managed to put one foot in front of the other in the wake of such an unimaginable reality.

It was high time she sucked it up, took her beheaded companion with her, and merrily toddled off around the galaxy while Za'il set about reclaiming the scraps of what little was left after more than two millennia.

_You sure do a good job of moping, Doctor,_ she scolded herself.

The shower console earned itself another well-deserved _whack_ as she punched at it with the same fist. Sure, she had merely stood beneath it for God-knows-how-long without putting any real effort into washing, but this would be good enough – she was adamant she would steal one last shower before they left the lifeboat for good, and _that_ was the one she would make count.

Her mood had hardly improved by the time she was dry, dressed and somewhat presentable, slinking back into the main room with remnants of that same sullen expression welded to her features. A tinge of something else, however, tugged at her downturned scowl as both pairs of eyes immediately fell upon her; as she froze mid-step by the piano self-consciousness flooded her belly and gripped at her spine, rising as a wave of heat that lingered about her cheeks and neck as she found herself glancing between the two men, finally settling her gaze upon the Engineer, prying at him, trying to decipher what the Hell _that look_ meant.

Stomach twisting with sinking annoyance, she realised that the hesitant gaze, lingering somewhere between feigned optimism and poorly-masked, wide-eyed sadness was pity.

_Pity_ , of all things.

As the silence lingered, she had little doubt the two had been talking.

For all the effort she'd sunk into hoping, _praying_ the two would get along for long enough to communicate, once it dawned on her that _of course_ she was destined to be the singular topic of discussion the moment she left the room, she found herself wishing they had remained at each others' proverbial – and literal – throats.

Worst of all, she distinctly remembered telling David to ask Za'il for details of what hd unfolded hours prior. Either the pale giant had far more in common with her species in the emotional department, or David had talked his head even further off than it already was when she left the room.

"Feeling better, Doctor?" The android's bright, overly polite voice was nothing short of jarring against the viscous quiet.

"Much better, thank you David," she forced through a plastic smile. "We should probably eat some breakfast and prepare for our escape."

"Wonderful idea," the android enthused. Za'il's gaze had finally drifted on after lingering for an uncomfortably significant length. "Is there anything I can help with?"

"Good question," she mused as she padded toward the food dispenser. The irony of her consideration of any task that _didn't_ involve him talking was not lost on her. "I'll discuss it with Za'il. I'm sure there's _something_ you can do."

The Engineer had flinched at the mention of his name, though she noticed it was nigh on imperceptible; she had simply grown used to it, actively hunting for the most subtle of movements whenever it came up in conversation. Offering a nod and the most neutral, pleasant smile she could muster, Shaw set about serving herself a bowl of porridge and a mug of coffee before drifting toward the couch with her meal, perching beside the stack of blankets that appeared to have mysteriously folded themselves between now and her shower.

As much as she was loathe to admit it, there was something striking about this particular vista that she would miss once it was gone. Morning light having faded to something far more akin to white than gold, the snowy peaks reaching beyond the atmosphere were a magnet for the eyes that one simply couldn't match on Earth; sure, Earth had its own astoundingly beautiful, dramatic, dangerous ranges, but the Human psyche was an extremophile in its own right and craved noting the _biggest_ , the _best_ , the _most noteworthy_. The monstrosity towering beyond the valley was that in spades, never letting her fool herself into thinking this was merely Everest for a second, eternally arching toward the Gas Giant looming above in a constant reminder of just how far from home she was.

Perhaps it was the beginnings of her imagination returning to her that left her picturing what this place must have been like in its hypothetical heyday; given it had been used, at some point, as at the very least a military base, it took little of that imagination to fill the blanks with settlements, creatures, a functioning biosphere. Maybe there was life beyond hangars, cargo bays and hideous vials filled with liquid death. Perhaps there were townships supporting the soldiers and providing the bare bones of an economy. Perhaps those settlements were surrounded by farms, producing exotic crops her mind lacked the creativity to paint the gaps with; maybe there were people that, just as she had, stared up into the night and gazed in wonder at the monstrous rings that glittered in the star's rays, faces stained violet by the Gas Giant's glow. Perhaps they, too, had become lost in the details of the crags of the glaciers beyond, comparing it to yet more worlds beyond this one as they went about their lives.

Lives long since lost – all that remained was dust and death, and creatures that exceeded one's worst nightmares.

In a manner of speaking, she felt it would be better if all this place had ever been was a military base. That way it would only be the flesh-and-blood tendrils of a presumably violent organisation that had met their grisly ends piled high against the walls of the base beyond, defiled from within having succumbed to...to... _God_ , she shuddered to think how they'd died.

A gentle _clink_ of crockery against glass jarred her from her breathless reverie; the Engineer paused as he placed his mug down, having drained it and moved on to a double serving of the same porridge she'd selected for herself – which, she noted, had begun to go cold. When had he sat down? How was she _that_ absent-minded?

She offered him another limp smile as her mind dragged her back out the plexiglass and into the valley. One thing she hadn't planned on finding enroute to seeing out their _invitation_ had been petrified bodies of giant humanoids, though in hindsight, she struggled to figure out just what she _had_ expected to find; with little more than a matching set of ancient rock carvings, beyond creatures _possibly_ larger than Humans, she was working with less than guesses from the start.

_Belief_ was what she was working with, she silently grumbled as she bit down on her spoon with bitter irritation.

The glint of the morning sun against the Engineer's suit caught the corner of her eye every time he moved his arm to poke at his porridge; normally, an eye full of sunlight was enough to drive her to at least grind her teeth to a fine powder, but today she was almost thankful for the way it dragged her out of her musings by the face.

Though she had seen far more of that suit design stretched over living, breathing flesh than she had over mummified corpses, seeing it in motion still periodically sent her for a spin. As much as the last week had, in its unending torrent of adrenaline and abject terror, almost become routine, the fact remained that more than three decades amongst her own kind, living on their one, singular planet, in the knowledge that they were, until this point, alone in the universe, made for a phenomenally disorienting shift in reality when viewing her current predicament in context. The bodies of long-dead Engineers had almost been more jarring a discovery than one living example, forced out of hypersleep by their own hand; seeing him sitting opposite her, picking at the fruit throughout the grey mush left in his bowl, oscillated wildly between feeling ghostly and strangely tangible.

That living example, she realised, was likely blissfully unaware of the carnage littering the towers.

The cold, sticky goop in her mouth was suddenly unbearable; she was a hair from retching as she forced it down.

Setting the remainder aside with an unamused grunt, Shaw stole a quick glance at the lists sprawled across the table, thumbing the corner of the closest for a brief moment before dragging it toward her, pen and all. Dark eyes watched with half-interest as she studied each item, brushing through the day's scrawl and poking idly at the sheet with the nib of the pen. The list itself was short enough, but there was significant meat on several items – chief among which was 'repair David'.

Speaking of whom...

She scrawled a quick note as she fumbled with the tablet, then pushed the pad across the table toward Za'il; she briefly glanced in the direction of the severed head as his gaze caught hers.

_Is there anything useful we can get him doing?_

The expression on his face was, on the surface of it, calm and neutral. He simply read over her note, silently considering it with far more poise than he had since the android had arrived. He was controlled. _Too_ controlled. Mirroring the same, she eyeballed every feature of his face as he reached down to pen a response with a civility that was so out-of-character she found herself plucking off red flags in the slightest of details. He had kept his heavy brows impassively raised and his mouth relaxed, but the slightest tensing of his jaw gave him away; his shoulders were almost _too_ relaxed, held down forcibly rather than sitting comfortably.

He wouldn't keep her guessing for long.

_Follow me outside. Give him a good excuse._

Her own eyebrows shot up as she finished translating the note; with the briefest brush of eye contact, he plucked the pen, pad and tablet from the table and began ambling toward the airlock. It did not go unnoticed that he'd turned their scrawlings against the tablet, out of the way of prying eyes.

_This isn't how I intended to spend my morning…_

Forcing calm with a heavy exhale, she followed a moment afterward and set about wrestling with her pressure suit, cursing her choice of jeans this morning as they bunched unhelpfully and resisted the suit's zipper.

"Where are you going, Doctor?" David enquired politely, his tone devoid of accusation or irritation.

"Uh," she began as she hopped on one foot, sealing the boot half-on the other. "Recon. Need to check the damage to the lifeboat from last night."

A pause. "What damage are you expecting to see?"

"I don't know, that's why we're going out there." _Damnit, now he's going to pry my excuse to pieces._ "Whatever it was out there tried to tear chunks off the ship. We just need to make sure it can still fly us to the hangar."

"Perhaps you could take me with you," he chirped pleasantly, "I have the ship's schematics in my memory banks, and I could help wi–"

"No disrespect, David," she quickly interrupted, patently aware of the black gaze burning a hole in the back of her head, "But I'm not in any state to be carrying your head around right now. Very sorry. We'll be back soon."

He lingered again as she stuffed her helmet on. "None taken, Doctor. I could be of service here, though."

"It just needs to hover, it doesn't need to break orbit," she quipped hastily. "We'll be back. Don't go anywhere!"

"Of course," he mused as the airlock slid open, then shut. Those words, in contrast to the rest, _did_ carry the slightest hint of bitterness.

* * *

With the airlock sliding shut behind them, Elizabeth finally indulged the luxury of eyeballing the immense creature with expectant impatience as she cautiously threw both palms out beside her. What on _Earth_ was this about?

And why wasn't he wearing his helmet?

Of all things, he chose to draw a breath and sink to a crouch; moments later he simply sat down cross-legged against the platform, flipping the pad over and pressing his fingers against the top leaf as it fluttered in the cool breeze. The faux calm he'd so carefully painted had faded, giving way to that damnable _pity_ that had hung around like a bad smell earlier in the morning. Refusing to break eye contact, she sank to a crouch and hunched against her ankles. This was new behaviour. In light of the events that had unfolded in the last week or two, surely she couldn't be blamed for remaining ready. Whatever _ready_ entailed.

Apparently ignoring her tense posture, Za'il turned his attention to the pad, scrawling a quick note, then offering the whole lot to her.

Placing the tablet against her thighs, she set about translating the message.

_I don't trust him. You shouldn't either._

She released a grumpy sigh. Hadn't they been through this?

As she fumbled with the pen, trying to assemble a sane response before attempting to translate it, two thick, translucent fingers pinched the top edge and gently tugged the pad back. If he was going to clarify his position, she was all ears; she offered him the pen.

He began to a longer message, brows furrowed as he appeared to carefully select words. Or second-guess his thoughts. Only he knew. Realising this was possibly going to be a fairly long exchange, she rolled backward and sat against the platform in a similar position, stealing a moment to glance about the expanse beyond as he wrote. Whatever had been out here last night appeared to be alone, from what she could tell; there was barely a sound beyond the gentle breaths of wind toying with the grit below, and the slow, deliberate pen-strokes opposite.

The message he'd handed her, after an extended moment, would take a while to translate. She blew another heavy sigh, and got to work.

_He gave me a lot of information this morning. A little about your mission, a lot about you. He didn't have much interest in the creature from last night, he kept talking about you. Told me some of what brought you here, told me some of what killed your crew. Told me about your work. Your husband._

She didn't even need to fully translate the message to understand the gist of it. Besides, so many of the words were becoming familiar by this point that she needed little effort to plough through it. But language was not the issue here – it didn't make sense that he would draw offense from that conversation. Sure, she was _still_ miffed that David had gone about divulging personal information about her while she wasn't present to defend herself – not that she should have to – but it was more of an insult to _her_ than a crime against _him_.

Her response felt inadequate, but it would have to do.

_What's wrong with that?_

He regarded her for another long, drawn moment, his dark eyes prying at her as he fiddled with the pen in one hand. How the light did strange things to him, toying with his features; aboard his own vessel, he had appeared just a little off white in the dim lighting, whilst that had been a far sharper white beneath the harsh artificial illumination aboard the lifeboat that did little to mask the stark alienness about his eyes, so wildly different in colour to his skin. In the full sunlight, outside, with no windows between them and the warm rays, there was most definitely a translucent element about his flesh that revealed faint, spidery networks of arteries deep below the skin. She flushed somewhat as she recalled the first time she'd noticed that detail – he'd been in quite a state of undress, and the majority of the vessels she'd noticed were _well_ covered by his suit at this point..

The searing light from the blue sky above did little to disguise the plethora of old scars about his head, face and hands, too; it was an understatement to presume each came with quite a story. Their wildly different appearances would suggest they'd not all arrived at once. She couldn't ignore the fact that his man had history, and not all of it was etched permanently into his skin.

He handed her an answer that was far more brief than she had expected, jarring her from her reverie.

_Every time he spoke of your misfortunes, he smiled. He enjoyed it._

If anything was going to seize words in her throat, _that_ observation would about do it.

There was an urgency rippling below his carefully-constructed patience; gone was the pity, he seemed to be trying to stare _straight through_ her.

This wasn't helping to alleviate the persistent niggle that had clung to her shadow since the moment they'd stepped foot aboard the Engineer ship. She knew, she _knew_ David had something to do with Charlie's untimely demise. He'd admitted to knowing far too much, and while she lacked any concrete evidence beyond that singular interaction, it continued to twist at her gut.

Perhaps Za'il wasn't wrong.

_I don't know what his motivations are, and no, I don't trust him. But I need him for my journey._

He scowled as he read her message, heaving a sigh; her persistence frustrated him, clearly, but surely he had learned by this point that her people were nothing if not resourceful.

In light of several of their previous discussions, it seemed almost out of character for him to be exuding quite so much patience.

He handed her a response.

_You're stubborn. But you must be careful. Keep him separated, he is dangerous._

_Don't need to tell me twice_ , she mused, tapping the pen's nib against the page as he handed it back. She didn't know if she had the patience to, once again, list the reasons keeping David disassembled would prove immensely impractical – not least of which was his weight, beyond the limits of what she could adequately carry.

_Hard for him to fly the ship in two pieces._

There was the slightest hint of a grin as he read her message, though he quickly sought to suppress it.

She knew exactly what he was going to say before he handed the pad back, so she was hardly surprised when it translated to precisely what she'd expected.

_Like I said. I will show you how._

Like it mattered what he thought of the android once he was on his way; it was patently obvious by this point that he intended to go in a separate direction to her. For the sake of maintaining this newfound peace for as long as possible, she realised it would be best to just humour him.

_Alright. I'll keep him as he is for as long as I can._

Again, he seemed intent on staring through her skin and deep into her inner workings; the sunlight against his pale flesh left the stare all the more ghostly.

_I'm serious. They don't have empathy for our kind._

She was left double-checking his last message; surely something had gone wrong in translation. After coming up with exactly the same thing a second time, she sought clarification.

_Our kind?_

Tapping the nib of the pen against the pad for a moment, he finally gave up halfway through another note, and reached across to tug the tablet from her lap. After a seemingly haphazard scroll through its contents, he completed the message with somewhat of a frown before handing the whole lot back to her.

_Living beings. Flesh, blood. His kind are programmed to obey, sometimes worship, but they cannot be programmed to have empathy for us._

Ah.

She shifted against the unforgiving metal of the deck as she ruminated. He _did_ have a point; David had happily toyed with her on several occasions, foregoing subtlety in favour of programmed decorum and feigned politeness. This was completely ignoring his treatment of Charlie, and the casual acknowledgement of wisdom into his death. Sure, he _had_ saved her life during the sandstorm that had damn-near blown her away from the _Prometheus_ and into next week, but she had also saved his – much to the very obvious outrage of the man sitting cross-legged opposite her, staring at her with a heady mix of determination and pity beneath a thin veneer of patience.

No matter what else was rattling about in her overwhelmed mind, the thought that kept fighting to the fore was written in plain text on her lap. _Our kind._ Content to disregard its context for the time being, ignoring its deliberate reference to the biological versus the synthetic, Shaw was determined to cling to the first sliver of victory she'd been afforded throughout this entire disaster.

Trust David of all people to force any kind of kinship between the two of them.

This, she realised, was the first time she had felt anything in common with the huge alien. From the moment she'd first seen him she'd recognised they were somehow, somewhere, distantly related: the skeletal structure, recognisably Human despite his sheer size; the hands, their shape no different to any Human male's; the shape of his face, eyes, head. The DNA evidence had confirmed it. And yet, from the outset of their first incredibly violent encounter, she had been painfully aware of just how _different_ he was – how different _they_ were. Every waking moment was a reminder of just how _little_ they had in common despite physical similarities.

And here, finally, there is the introduction of an _us_. _Our kind._

She drew a breath, and pressed pen against paper.

_I understand. I believe you. There are things that were said and done during this voyage that make me agree with you._

She had to admit, thinking about the death and destruction surrounding them so intently wasn't doing her composure any favours. There was no reason she should be expected to keep it together as well as she had, especially considering...considering…

_No,_ she was _not_ going to think about what happened just hours ago. It had been challenging enough reassembling herself into a functional Human being; she wasn't going to resume moping and further embarrass herself.

Then when _was_ she going to properly mope?

_Damnit, Elizabeth_ , she chided through gritted teeth, _you owe it to everyone to push through this in one piece!_

Rolling her eyes upward as she chewed on her bottom lip, she fought the sting of yet more tears, refusing to allow them to well up when she had nowhere to hide. It wasn't exactly a subtle technique, but damnit, it worked – so long as she didn't open the floodgates.

And damnit, she could _feel_ the stare against her skin.

Pity had returned, etched into the concern twisting his pale skin. She scowled, largely at herself.

He scribbled a quick note, then hesitantly handed it to her. The pity remained.

_Are you alright?_

Of all the questions he could have asked, why _that one_?

Perhaps it was a genuine question amongst his people. Perhaps there wasn't a thousand-and-one different things it could mean, and twice as many ways it could go; perhaps it wasn't a sure-fire way to reduce the recipient to tears where he came from, the ubiquitous conversation-starter when one wanted to pry back the last tendrils of defense holding a suffering soul in one shaking, fractured piece.

His eyes seemed so much closer to blue than black in the harsh sunlight.

One big, fat tear rolled down her left cheek as she bit down on both lips, refusing to yield to the bout of self-absorbed angst bubbling just below the surface. Reflexively her left jerked up to dab it away, smear the evidence from its trail…

...but, naturally, her knuckles bounced off the polymer shield encompassing her head with a _thunk._

"Damnit," she murmured with a splutter of laughter. How absurd.

Sucking in another breath as her nose began to resist her dwindling control over her body, she quickly scribbled a response. From the mess already on the page and from, at this point, constant repetition, she didn't find a need for the tablet.

_I'll be alright._

The Engineer offered a solemn nod as he examined the page, gaze lingering for a moment before turning back toward the pad pinched between his fingers. Through the haze of tears she picked at the smallest of details as he poked at the paper with one hand, the other holding the page down against the increasingly brisk breeze; it was becoming easier and easier to read his facial expressions as she continued to discover just how much they had in common. Perhaps this was why he neglected to wear a helmet, she reasoned; he was allowing her to draw more than mere linguistics from their conversation, relying as much on body language as the written word. How wise of him – there was certainly plenty of subtext lost to the medium language neither were fluent in, critical nuance she was robbed of every time he donned his armour.

Curiously, it seemed he could breathe the air out here for extended periods. She had lost track of the time they'd spent perched in the sun, but she had little doubt that if it had been her sans helmet, she'd have long since been stone cold and lifeless.

He did, at least, appear to be breathing a little more heavily than he usually did aboard the lifeboat.

The message he handed her after plenty of obvious agonising was unambiguous. She didn't even need to translate it.

_I'm sorry._

Refusing to let her iron grasp on composure slip any further, she resisted the rising, welling wall of heat in the pit of her gut and briefly squeezed her eyes shut, letting a heavy tear roll down each cheek before drawing a deep breath and exhaling slowly as she again raised a hand to mop the mess free of her face.

_Clunk_.

Predictably, she wound up backhanding the helmet again.

With a defeated, humourless laugh, she instead rested her elbow against her knee and plopped the edge of the helmet in her hand as she thumbed the pen with the other. There was little doubt in her mind she looked the very definition of miserable right now – or, perhaps more accurately, pathetic. It was impossible to tell which his pity was directed at. What she did have, however, was his full attention, and, evidently, his worry – feigned or otherwise.

She dabbled, for a moment, with the idea of musing how little he knew about her; then, regrettably, she recalled how much he _did_ know about her. Her stomach churned as she ruminated on what the android had likely told him while her back was turned. What sort of sordid detail had he gone into to have yielded this sort of response from the alien giant who, by all rights, had no reason to invest _any_ concern into her small, pink existence?

With little left to lose, she proposed she had more to gain by opening up a little further, offering what might be the first truly personal information exchanged between the two of them. For this, she would need the tablet; shifting her left hand from her helmet, she thumbed at it against the deck as she set about organising the storm of thoughts churning about her mind into a coherent sentence.

_I'm just lonely. So much has happened since we landed. I'm left questioning everything. It's so hard to talk about it through paper, I fear misunderstandings. And the talking head is no help._

He seemed to gaze at the message for a lifetime, heavy-lidded and solemn, though the final portion of the note elicited a faint quirk of an amused, lopsided smile. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears as he read the message again and again; it was an understatement to say she felt bare, almost vulnerable. Trepidation clawed at her chest as he raised the pen, paused, thought better of it and re-read her statement again. Why on Earth had she said that?

_This is not Earth_ , she mused darkly as he finally wrote a reply and passed it to her. _Not even close. Anything goes._

She set to work translating his message through pursed lips.

_I feel the same, I understand. It's difficult with no one else left._

_Not to put a finer point on it, Za'il_ , she silently grumbled as she penned a response.

The familiar urge to bank a hug began to tug at her chest; she swallowed, refusing to allow it purchase, and concentrated on the task at hand.

_I don't know if I can hold it together much longer._

After a long pause, he offered her a short answer with the vaguest hint of a reassuring smile.

_Be strong. The sooner we leave this world, the better._

The urge to steal a hug hadn't faded. In fact, the barely-sapient part of her mind that stalked her psyche under pressure like this was convinced she could draw that strength through his skin and keep it to herself.

She would _not_ shatter the peace they had carefully constructed by violating his personal space!

Drawing another of the many heavy breaths this suit's life support had tolerated, she instead decided to change the subject; the glint of claw-marks against the doors to her left served as a reminder as to why they were outside in the first place.

_I told him we were checking the outside of the ship. We should probably do that so we have something to tell him._

The wind almost whipped the pad from his fingers as she handed it to him; blinking away the burst of debris that swirled about them in that last, fervent gust, he opted to offer her a nod instead of a note as he tore the top sheet free and handed the pad back, slipping his feet over the side of the platform as he tore their discussion to shreds and allowed the blustering breeze to claim its tatters.

There was a slight stagger about his landing, and a shuffle about the way he walked from it as he began to encircle the lifeboat.

Tucking the pad and tablet against her chest as she followed, her eyes were quickly drawn to the litany of rake-marks against the dark hull; two apiece, it was readily apparent that something claw-like had pried angrily against the surface, with clusters of scratches and divots appearing along the seams and curves well above her. In fact, many of them extended far above the Engineer's head. The hull wasn't painted, though – the dark, plated alloy was a Weyland Industries creation that could withstand more than just the bombardment that came with interstellar travel. It would take significant impact or incredibly sharp metal to cause it the damage they were seeing.

She scarcely wanted to believe this new damage was caused by anything that could be described as a _creature_.

Cautiously popping his head alongside the belly of the vessel, Za'il lingered for a significant period as he examined every nook and cranny capable of harbouring any such creature. To be fair, she was certain they would have been quickly overwhelmed by any of its friends as they basked in the sun above, but given the events of the previous evening, one could never be too careful.

He spent a considerably shorter stretch lowered to his belly as he examined the underside of the hull, hands and feet poised against the dirt ready to spring back up at a moment's notice. Crouching alongside him, she stole a glance at what remained of the engines, last night's clattering and banging still ringing in her ears.

It was quickly evident that one of the heat shields had been torn free of its housing and then shredded to pieces, its warped and mangled husk lying several metres from the engine. A few scraps of it remained, blackened tendrils dangling from the pod above. This, she realised, was the most damaged of the engines – they had shut it down during their first flight. Of all the engines the creature could have tried to tear apart, she was relieved it was _that_ one.

A quick scout around the exterior of the ship revealed similar claw-marks at almost every join in the hull, with some of the plating above the external nacelles pared back with apparent brute force. Above some of the bent metal were several imprints that immediately reminded her of a bird's footprint in the sand, only significantly larger and meatier. The inner workings of the nacelles, thankfully, appeared to have survived the attack intact and largely ignored.

The blackened remains of the creature lingered at the very edge of her periphery as they passed below the cockpit; she refused, absolutely _refused_ to look at it, no matter how desperately her curiosity begged for release, knowing it would send her to her knees in agony or, more likely, into a shrieking, flailing wreck as she mindlessly ran from the monstrosity.

Something told her Za'il was in no state to follow her if she _did_ decide to arbitrarily take off in a mad panic. There was most definitely a stagger about his steps at this point, posture hunched below heavy-lidded eyes and, by the time they neared the platform from the far side of the vessel, he was all but dragging his heels.

It was all he could do not to collapse to his knees as they arrived at the platform, gripping it with both hands as he bent over it. Holding the top page down as she placed the pad in front of him, Shaw pushed herself up onto the deck and crouched against her ankles, concern prying at her features. Distantly, she found it rather amusing that she was barely eye-to-eye with him despite his hunched, slack posture against the ship as he stood at the point where it hung the highest from the ground.

Blinking away his dazed expression as he refocused on the pad before him, he scratched at the fresh top sheet with a shaky hand. At this point, she realised just how heavily he was breathing. Despite the increasing, blustering wind, he appeared to be sweating; his face glistened. She had a good idea what he was going to tell her.

He pressed the pad toward her then, as she set about translating, heaved himself up onto the platform breathlessly, pausing on all fours before sucking in a breath and pushing himself to his feet.

_The air is terrible._

She smirked knowingly; yes, his decision to come out here without a helmet had been a dubious one. Still, he had lasted an order of magnitudes longer than a Human would have in the hostile atmosphere.

Staggering as he pushed through the airlock, he came within a hair of smacking his head against the upper frame as he tilted sideways. One hand shot out to prop himself against the wall inside as she followed, immediately prying at her helmet as the door slid shut and placing it, alongside the pad and tablet, on top of the crates still littering the entrance.

The sound of deep, laboured breathing hadn't been overlooked by the pieces of android under the piano. "Is he alright, Elizabeth?"

"I suspect the atmosphere has changed a little since he last spent any stretch of time out there," she observed, casting him a quick glance over her shoulder as she sauntered toward the android. "He certainly lasted longer than I would have out there."

The Engineer's deep voice interjected, albeit thin and breathless amongst gasps. David responded in a friendly but matter-of-fact tone after a moment's consideration, and again with similar-sounding words after a second question. Elizabeth watched silently as he sank down against the wall, hunching with his elbows against his knees as he fought to gain control over his breathing. After a stretch, he added a final thought before mopping at his clammy face with the back of one hand.

"You're quite right, Doctor," David mused. "It appears the carbon dioxide levels have almost quadrupled in the time he was in stasis. There is also less oxygen available in the lifeboat's atmosphere than there is outside; it may take him a little while to catch his breath – though it appears his suit compensates for it considerably."

"I assumed as much," she muttered, shifting to her knees alongside the beheaded machine. "Looks like we've got more time up our sleeves than we thought. There's another storm coming. The wind is picking up and there's clouds on the horizon; I don't think we're taking off today."

"How much damage was there?" David asked carefully and deliberately, plainly ignoring Shaw's previous statement.

"Claw-marks at every join, looks like it had a go at several of the engines too," she quickly responded. "Should still fly. In the meantime, I should be able to finish capping your broken wiring."

"Are you sure?" He persisted. "Perhaps if you'd take me outside to see, I could give you a more thorough report."

_I don't think he's buying it,_ she mused grimly as she forced a smile. "It doesn't need to fly far. And I'm not going back out there with the wind picking up as it is."

"Understood, but–"

"David," she interjected as she began to drag him out from under the piano. "Do you want me to fix you, or not?"

"I would prefer to be fully assembled," he responded with a terse tone he'd poorly disguised. Perhaps that was his intention.

"Then you'll need to lead me through." Pushing herself to her feet, Shaw set about retrieving the repair kit with a grunt. "The storm will buy us time, but not _that_ much."

"Yes, ma'am," he eventually sighed.

As he opened his mouth to add another thought, she found herself scrambling for another distraction; the last thing she wanted to do was admit the two of them had been talking about the android behind his back. Though, in retrospect, fair was fair; that's exactly what _he_ had done while she showered.

"Oh, and another thing, David. Whatever did you do with my cross?"

A glint of realisation washed over his steely eyes. "Back pocket. Or, at least it should be, if it wasn't dislodged during transport."

He hadn't even finished before she began fumbling about the beheaded android's rear. He continued. "I apologise, Elizabeth. I should have given it back to you sooner."

"Yes, you should have," she replied darkly, carefully. Finding the small, plastic jar it was encased in, she immediately set about prying the cap off. "I'm just glad it's still there."

"Spot of good faith?" He offered with a smile.

Shaw gritted her teeth. "Sure."

* * *

As the morning became afternoon, the wind had swiftly and violently picked up, just as she had predicted; by the time several hours of fiddling with shredded wires and frayed bioskin had elapsed, the whistling about the vessel's curves had given way to a thunderous, persistent roar that brought with it a near-constant clatter of silica and debris against the hull. Their view of the valley had disappeared amongst a brown, horizontal rush of particulate matter as the vessel bounced idly against its fixtures. Still, their present landing spot felt somewhat more stable than its initial, precarious perch upon the rocks it had initially crashed onto.

Za'il had eventually caught his breath, and after a few false starts, had shaken his light-headedness enough to resume being useful. Lunch had been in order shortly thereafter, and while the storm had peaked at its worst, Elizabeth had paused in her repairs to begin packing supplies into a handful of bags as the Engineer disappeared for a shower. He'd certainly smelled like he needed one, given his sweat-soaked state when he'd staggered back on board.

Hours more had flown by as they continued their preparations in relative silence, save the occasional distinctly inert conversation between Shaw and David, and the odd question directed at Za'il, which he predictably rebuffed given half a chance. Though the wind had faded from fever pitch by the time the sun had started to sink below the horizon, it was still far too blustery outside for a safe take-off in her opinion, and David had quickly agreed when shown the most recent scan of the engines. He'd questioned the sanity in flying it at all, to be fair, but had quickly been shot down with a choice few gruff words from the Engineer.

Deliberately leaving the android's neck severed and finding several excuses to leave it as such, Shaw had parked her repair efforts with a mighty yawn and dramatic stretch, staggering to her feet in search of water as Za'il continued to wrestle with the growing pile of bags littering the space between the airlock and the now half-empty crates. He had started off with a fairly extensive list of _things_ to shove into the tall, overstuffed shoulder packs, but had soon realised there was far too much to carry should they need to do anything more physical than slowly, painfully lugging them down the hallway between hangars. There was every possibility they would be ambushed in the process, and realising that Elizabeth, too, had plenty to carry, he set about stripping his supplies back to the bare necessities.

Having watched him pace back and forth between the supplies at one end of the room and the holographic juggernaut hovering over the table at the other, Shaw also came to the conclusion she'd overpacked; leaving David to pester her from the opposite side of the room, she slowly reorganised the packs and whittled the most important supplies down to just one large bag with enough room for David's head at the very top.

By the time they had reduced the cruft to what they could sensibly carry and arranged it by the airlock, the light had faded from the eerie orange of dirt reflecting the sun, to sanguine dust dispersing the last of its rays, and finally to a dull purple as the howling wind finally died to a hushed breeze, toying with the settling dust and debris beneath the glow of the rising, omnipresent Gas Giant.

Shaw thought she would never adjust to the short days on this horrible world, her sleep cycle shot to pieces as it fought for a few extra hours of daylight with the arrival of each evening – but in the shadow of the previous evening, and having withstood a day that oscillated wildly between physical labour and emotional turmoil, she had to admit she would welcome early rest in this instance.

Stars vied for dominance amongst the glint of dust and rock in the immense rings illuminating the night beyond the lifeboat. She knew that by this time tomorrow, she would be among them; this would be her last opportunity to admire the enormous mountains before them, as much as she begrudged them for the foetid slurry of death and destruction they obscured with their icy beauty. Stained pink in the ambient light of the night, they certainly made for _quite_ a story should she ever return to Earth.

The mere thought left her struggling to chew her dinner.

Za'il had joined her for another meal, opting to sit opposite her as he gazed out the window, his own eyes prying at the landscape in a similar, distant manner to hers, though she could only guess as to what he was thinking about. Certainly nothing like her own musings. He had his work cut out for him the moment he reached orbit.

It was the silence of their meals she found so unnerving, she finally realised; no matter how much or how little she herself had spoken during shared meals, it was others that kept the silence at bay. From business discussions to idle thoughts about their day, from intellectual discussions – or arguments – to inane, childish banter, there had always been some semblance of noise about dinner that she had, until now, taken for granted. Without language, it was nigh on impossible to have those discussions, and it wasn't like she was about to repeatedly drop her stew on the table to translate a note in Sumerian and scribble a reply.

Why she had chosen a plain old stew was beyond her, too; with the exception of breakfast tomorrow, this would be her last Earth-based meal in a very long time. She could have chosen anything, anything; of all the options, she chose a feeble imitation of beef soaking in artificial red wine and tomatoes. And yet, the scent and the texture of it reminded her of a home she no longer called home. It was strangely comforting.

David had been quiet for quite some time. When he finally piped up, she was hardly surprised. "Doctor, have you thought of a destination yet?"

"Not yet," she lied, unwilling to allow either of the men in the room to set off another chain-reaction argument. She was too tired for their shenanigans. "I guess we'll figure it out once we're in orbit."

"Understood," he responded brightly.

"In the meantime," she continued, placing her empty bowl down on the coffee table as she rose to her feet, "I'm going to have a long, hot shower. Probably the last in a while. Don't you two have _too_ much fun at my expense while I'm gone."

"Yes, ma'am," David enthused with a pleasant smile she simply couldn't bring herself to trust.

* * *

Having soaked for what felt like an hour or longer – certainly enough to leave her fingers and toes wrinkled like prunes – Elizabeth had stepped out of the shower into the gentle trill of a piano being played elsewhere. The sombre thrum of a tune she didn't recognise persisted as she dried her hair, brushed her teeth and climbed into fresh clothing. It continued as she stepped out of the bedroom and into the main lobby, almost tripping over a mass of limbs by the door in the process.

"Terribly sorry," David apologised as she staggered aside.

"Wh–…" she began, glancing between the android and the Engineer; the latter hardly noticed her as he played on. It seemed he'd absorbed several of the techniques she'd shown him as she'd played days ago. His playing sounded far more like what one would hear on Earth, though the tune itself was almost unsettlingly foreign. "Why are you down here?"

Though he had been arranged with some modicum of respect, David's head was cocked off on a strange angle amongst limp limbs he clearly still had no control over. Of course, she intentionally hadn't reconnected any of the cabling required for that. Only his main power cable remained plugged in.

"He shifted me," he responded with a matter-of-fact tone, though there was the most subtle thread of indignation below it. "Apparently my position beside the stool was _creepy_."

She stifled a laugh. "Your words or his?"

His eyebrows shot up. "I would hardly describe myself as _creepy_ , Doctor."

"I don't know," she mused with a grin, "The Headless Horseman act is a little unsettling. Hardly your fault, though."

Having noted the amused expression on her face, the Engineer paused in his playing with similarly raised brows. After a moment he got to his feet, kicked the stool aside, and reached for the pen and pad that had ended up sitting against the piano's lid. Another moment lingered before he scratched a message into a fresh sheet, gently pushed it toward her, and stood alongside the pile of books nearby.

By now she had little patience left for the translation game, but she decided to allow him one last exception for the evening. She was fed, showered, warm, and feeling generous enough. Thumbing through the tablet, she made short work of the message.

_The third song you played._

Apparently he, too, had grown tired of the translation game, and opted for overt laziness. Glancing across at him quizzically, she sought clarification and quickly received it; he simply raised both hands patiently, flicking his fingers as if playing the piano.

What _had_ that song been? The first, he had slept through; she chose to discount that one.

The second, the first he'd noticed, had left him standing slack-jawed at the opposite end of the instrument. The one that followed had gripped him, despite her fumbling with missed keys and damn-near forgetting chunks of the song she'd not heard in years.

Remembering his frozen, entranced gawp at the final she'd played on a whim, she had little doubt it was _that_ he'd requested an encore for.

"What's going on up there, Doctor," David asked from the floor. "Is everything alright?"

"Of course, David," she responded quietly. There was nothing sincere about his concern, she had since decided. His persistence at her supposed defense was wearing her patience thin. "He just wants me to play a song."

"Ah," he purred. "What song would that be?"

"You'll recognise it," she smiled, sinking down against the stool. There was a tepid butt-print already pressed into it, much to her amusement; the warm leather stuck to the backs of her bare thighs.

Za'il had crouched beside her the moment she began to play, staring silently and intently at her fingers as they stroked at the keys. The ice about them was long-gone this time. She could only assume he'd been playing the majority of the time she was in the shower.

This time, the song was a special request. This time, she had doubled her audience. And this time, it would be the last she would play a piano for a very long time. She could not ignore the constant barrages of _lasts_ that permeated the day; there was a finality about it, a finality she had tried to ignore for a number of days, one that had distantly occurred to her as she stepped aboard the _Prometheus_ two years ago and one she now could not help but consider an extended, haunting _Last Supper_ afforded to her before setting off on an unapologetically bold voyage, the likes of which were unquestionably a first amongst her kind.

And for that, she poured her heart into the keys, barely taking a breath as she allowed each repeating verse to gather power, striking the keys with increasing fervour as the words hung about her lips. The noise had quickly exceeded that of her previous foray with the tune as she closed her eyes, allowing it to flow from hard-wired memory.

If only the people of Earth could see this now. – a crashed lifeboat as the only remnants of a failed voyage, marooned on an alien moon with her beheaded android and giant alien companions, pounding an old classic into the fibres of an overpriced and over-engineered piano as if this were some sort of strange, remote cocktail bar at the edge of the Galaxy. She would laugh if it wasn't happening _right now_ ; perhaps she would laugh in a few days when she was lightyears from this place.

For now, she was content to _make shit up_ and pound a few extra, rising, pounding verses in where they didn't belong, reluctant to leave the instrument as she knew the moment she did, that would be _it, the end,_ the closing of the book that was this last chapter in her life and the beginning of a terrifying sequel drenched in unknowns. She would cling to that final page as long as she was allowed.

She had never, _ever_ played with this sort of passion. She was loathe to stop.

It was only the silent shuffle of footsteps alongside her that snapped her from her determined playing; the Engineer had stood, face turned away from her, and had begun slowly pacing toward the broad, floor-to-ceiling window behind her.

Her stomach dropped. Had she done something wrong? Was he expecting an exact replica of her first crack at it? _Goddamn him_ and his unpredictable moodiness.

Tailing off her little performance with little flourish, her fingers hung above the keys as the sound faded and plunged the vessel back into silence. With a sigh, she dragged her feet off the floor and crossed her legs against the stool, gently thumbing at the retracted cover as her mind set about catastrophising about the obvious.

"That was quite a performance," David mused from beneath her after a breath. "I didn't know you could play like that."

"You did," she shot quietly. "You've seen my dreams."

"I've seen you _play_ ," he corrected. "It's a shame you never continued it, you're quite talented. But you've never played like _that_."

She couldn't resist a smile; if flattery was the game he was playing tonight, she would concede him this one, small victory. "Pulling out all the stops for a special moment. I don't know when I'll play again, to be honest. It's not like we can drag this thing with us when we leave."

"Indeed not," he responded thoughtfully. "Perhaps we'll have to pop back by Earth sometime and acquire something a little more...portable."

"One day," she mused. Her smile faded to something a touch sadder. "Maybe."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life still has me by the throat. But this one is for you guys.
> 
> Yes, this is a hurt/comfort sort of fic. I'm oddly a sucker for this genre.
> 
> Secondly, I've taken on board the mentions of short chapters – a couple of you have noted now that you're likely expecting a bit more juice. For some reason I struggle to get out more than about 6k words, but this one is over 10k, just to see if I can cover that sort of ground. It took all damn weekend to get it to this length, but hopefully this is a bit more to bask in.
> 
> Also. I'm sure it would have legitimately killed the Prometheus writers to, you know, do some research. The levels of CO2 on LV-223 wouldn't have done immediate damage to a Human being, and the lethal levels are almost four times what they depicted it as. For the sake of sanity, I'm subtly doubling the readings and writing the ship off as borked – and giving the Engineers a higher resistance to hypercapnia than Humans.
> 
> And finally: normally I like to drag the suspense out a bit, but I'll hand this one to you guys. Za'il is FAR too macho to let a lady see him tearing up over a mere song. So he's put himself in time-out.


	15. The Bold

"So; what exactly are we doing?"

The morning had swung into action with a flurry of activity unseen aboard the ostentatious vessel to date, starting with Elizabeth clambering out of bed, shaking the Engineer awake and stabbing about the android's neck to awaken him from self-induced standby. While Za'il had slowly shaken his doziness in a series of crippling yawns and stretches, David hadn't hesitated in attempting to make idle conversation with the woman charging about the bar with mugs of coffee and plates of food. A series of one-word and otherwise short, barely polite answers left him eventually tailing off, leaving her to destroy a plate of bacon and eggs opposite the sleepy, vague figure occupying the other couch, who eventually followed suit in relative quietude.

A final run through their respective checklists and a brief rifle through the tidy pile of bags by the airlock had left the android watching in studied silence until Elizabeth had begun fiddling with the clasps on his main power cord, at which point he had finally given into curiosity – or, perhaps, impatience.

"We're flying this broken old bucket to the first hangar," she responded calmly as the clips finally popped loose and released the head from the severed nest of wires sprouting from the hole between the synthetic shoulders. "We'll drop off his gear, then make our way to the loading dock of the second hangar. Unfortunately it's not accessible by foot on the surface – not safely, anyway, from what I can tell."

David arched a brow as she tugged his head away from the rest of him; Za'il wasted little time in grabbing the lifeless body by the arm and effortlessly dragging it onto the pile of bags, not quite throwing it aside as if discarding it, but not with what either Shaw or David would describe as finesse. "I'm certain there are several easily-accessible vessels close to us. There are three of the same design as his in the hangars by the first tower."

"Full of corpses," she noted hurriedly. Her expression soured. "It seems like a fair few people died in stasis over the millennia."

The Engineer muttered something in the off-hand, disinterested tone he'd taken to communicating with David in as he swiped the tablet, pen and pad from the piano lid and slipped it into Elizabeth's pack.

"Apparently he'd like me to accompany him to the cockpit," David quipped as Shaw lifted him from the ground.

She nodded, momentarily placing him on the lid of the piano. "I figured he would. Sorry about this, David."

"Sorry for what ex–" He paused as he immediately understood; Elizabeth had hefted his head up in both arms, cradling the side of his face against her chest in an awkward clasp. He said nothing more as she carried him up the narrow stairwell, hot on the heels of the immense Engineer ahead of her as he filled the confined space. She was certain, by this point, that his suit had scraped a thin veneer of the walls' surface off with its most solid parts.

The android simply peered up at the diminutive woman from below her chest as she patiently waited for Za'il to squeeze himself into the pilot's seat, and kept the smarmy comments she was certain he was brewing to himself as she clambered into the copilot's position. Cheeks flushing, she hurriedly set him down on her lap and rotated him toward the controls once she was settled.

The Engineer had cast her a side-glance below raised brows, briefly, before setting about powering the vessel's propulsion systems up.

"Curious," David mused quietly from his perch, "You've gone to the trouble of labelling most of the controls. Very clever."

"Question is, are they accurate?" She murmured as she subtly adjusted David's head to view more of the labels around the immense Engineer. "Doesn't help that our interface language is from a pre-industrial race, and that I wouldn't know the first thing about flying one of these things. Or flying anything, really."

David's pale eyes quickly scanned each and every paper label as the gauges below them flickered to life one-by-one. "Some of the translations are a little creative, but nonetheless, they appear largely accurate. I'm impressed, given the multiple limitations you faced."

"Understatement of the Century," she quietly huffed with a quick eye-roll. "Whoever finds this vessel in the future is going to be left scratching their heads, I'm sure."

The Engineer interjected before David could respond to her; after a moment the beheaded android launched into a series of polite, matter-of-fact phrases in the _other_ median language available to them, pausing after each statement as Za'il fiddled with a different control, or series thereof. Before long it became clear that he was elaborating on each one, likely in some sort of useful order. With exactly none of it forming any sort of meaning to her, Shaw was left simply observing the exchange in practised silence.

With a vastly more neutral patience than he'd displayed to date, upon inspection of the last of the controls in David's lengthy instruction, the Engineer began asking – she assumed – questions about several more, and quietly waited for the talking head to elaborate. Hunched over the Human-sized console, crushed into the Human-sized seat, fingers flying over the English-based display, he ought to have been far more out of place than he currently appeared. There was little question in her mind he was born to fly; perhaps that was why he was so insistent it would take little to teach her to operate one of his own kind's vessels. To him, perhaps it _was_ trivial. He'd certainly made short work of the _Prometheus_ lifeboat, all things considered.

In fact, he'd made short work of much of their encounter. Having quickly demystified much of the technology on board, including flying a borderline unflyable, absolutely un-airworthy craft, it was obvious he was no slouch. He'd learned to communicate with her in one dead language, and responded to David in another – that was a minimum of three languages he understood. Heck, he'd even deciphered, and dominated, the baby Grand sitting downstairs. He hadn't even needed a demonstration to give it life.

In this moment, Elizabeth realised she was hardly the smartest person in the room. The mere thought was one of the least comfortable she'd had of late, and _boy-howdy_ had she processed a thought or two in the last week or two.

"Good news, Doctor," David purred softly, jarring her from her reverie with a subtle twitch that wouldn't have gone unnoticed by the android. "He believes he can account for the vessel listing to the port side during flight. There are additional controls neither of you were aware of."

"That _is_ good news. Thank you, David."

"A pleasure," he smiled. "He believes our technology to be 'archaic, crude, but effective enough' – I would be tempted to disagree, but his kind _have_ been in space far longer than us. I imagine it _is_ all of those things to him."

"Honestly, I get the feeling that's his general opinion of Earth as a whole," she grumbled softly, tentatively balancing David's head between both hands as she shifted in her seat.

Za'il murmured something, casting a cramped glance over his shoulder at Elizabeth, then at David.

"Are you ready to take off, Doctor?"

She offered a nod in response, though it was not directed at the android.

By now the deep _thrum_ of the ship's engines belching to life had grown familiar enough that the subtle, building vibration throughout the cockpit no longer alarmed her. This time, she noted, there was far less guesswork about the Engineer's movements; his hands seemed to know exactly where to go, plucking at the console with practised precision that made it all the more obvious, in retrospect, what a flustered state he'd been in the previous times they'd been in this space.

Though, given the circumstances, she hardly blamed him: deciphering a complete unknown the first time would have been stressful, to say the least; using said unknown to destroy a monster in the dark would have been easily as stressful, given the stakes.

Perhaps he finally saw the value in having a translator at his disposal.

A familiar rattle swelled throughout the cockpit as dust billowed about the vessel outside, plumes engulfing the view. Instinctively, Shaw found her left hand darting between the seat bolster and David's neck; in the back of her mind she knew it was only a matter of time before the ship began pitching to and fro. Still, flailing between the two was hardly helpful. She forced her hand to grasp what remained of the android for a moment.

"David, where may I hold you? I'd rather you didn't end up under the console the moment it gets bumpy."

"You may hold me however you wish," he responded plainly, the faint quirk of the lips just out of her view. "But I doubt this will be a rough ride; he has a far better idea of how to manage the vessel now."

Her eyes darted between the massive frame of the Engineer, the billowing dust cloud obscuring their view, and the blonde mop on her lap. "I don't want to be disrespectful and grab you by the hair or anything. Strange enough with your head sitting on my lap."

David's smile grew. "Thank you for thinking of me."

She eventually settled with pinning the shredded remains of the top of his shoulder against her thigh with one hand, gripping the seat bolster with the other as the pitch of the engines spiked, heralding the familiar lurch as the vessel heaved itself from solid ground. David hadn't lied, she quickly realised, as it merely wobbled in place rather than rolling about, its hovering above the dirt vastly more stable than their previous two excursions.

 _Heaved itself_ , she noted, was probably somewhat of a lie; two huge, pale hands were very much hard at work maintaining that precarious balance, flitting from control to control as the crippled ship eased itself about and began its languid, limping sojourn toward the buildings finally appearing in the distance through the umbre haze.

As their altitude climbed above the seething dust cloud, the silhouettes of the towers off the port side gradually glinted detail after growing, amber detail in the morning sun. Some of the ornate, weathered intricacies almost looked like lettering. Others seemed merely decorative. It vaguely frustrated her that she'd spent so much time searching for evidence of Engineers that she'd barely spent a moment admiring the whimsy of the alien architecture, the very first artificial structures they'd found on the planet's surface. Not that Charlie's insistence on marching straight in had helped matters, but upon reflection, she sorely wished she'd taken – or had – the opportunity to sit back and pick away at every little detail.

Though, also upon reflection, it would have likely led to their deaths. Though she could only imagine the origins of the creature that had tried to force entry two nights ago, she had little doubt it would have found them had they spent their first week on the surface admiring the details of the site from outside and taking notes.

And that, without a doubt, would have denied them the opportunity to meet the alien occupying the pilot's seat aboard this very ship.

Though, that would have potentially saved Ford, Jackson and Weyland's lives.

If they'd survived the lurking beasts elsewhere, that is.

All these _what ifs_ left her head aching.

A slight bounce in the vessel's path as it rounded the first tower sent her stomach into her chest, as one hand clawing at David's neck as the other tightened its grip. _Minor turbulence_ , she reassured herself as her heart thrashed harder in her chest, _you've experienced far worse turbulence before_.

Another jolt fluttered through the cockpit as the bottles downstairs rattled against their racks. The golden glow of morning sunshine against the towers below had since begun to fade to a clammy, sickly yellow, still starkly bright as they glowed against a rapidly greying backdrop of storm clouds gathering on the horizon. It appeared they would find themselves once again waiting out a storm – she just hoped it would be _after_ they landed.

The second tower slipped past beyond the plexiglass, the sheer scale of it not lost on her wide, transfixed gaze. The path that snaked up to the first, looping around and between each subsequent tower, had appeared substantial enough on foot that its weathered edges barely suggested there was a path at all, but from above it was mere twine, tying the series of structures together in a delicate, pale web untrodden for millennia. It would have taken them _days_ to traverse the length of the base on foot...if they survived the first night in the open at all.

Za'il's deep, rumbling voice broke the monotony of the engine's roar. David's followed after a pause, watching as the Engineer's right hand swiped over a blank space in the centre of the console, then following with another slew of instructions as the shiny black expanse fluttered to life with a series of complicated displays. It was yet another colourful belch of interface clutter amongst a sea of indecipherable information; there was little doubt she'd chosen the correct career path in lieu of scrambling about this sort of rot.

The last of the towers had slid past below them as he began fiddling with the new display, his left hand jumping from one control to the next in an effort to keep the vessel stable as the right fumbled. Having navigated away from the towers and onward, the vessel gradually slowed to a warbling, precarious hover over seemingly empty land and, after further fiddling with the controls, content to hold position without pitching and rolling all over the place as Za'il refocused on the centre console with a huff.

Another question in their shared ancient language; David's response was as polite as ever, calmly directing the Engineer as he appeared to flip through several different display modes before settling on one with a needlessly complex grid of buttons.

Having dug at her skin for the vast majority of their voyage, curiosity finally won over obedient silence. "David, what _is_ that display?"

"Communications system, Doctor."

"Ah." With whom he intended to communicate, she had no idea.

After a moment's pause, Za'il asked another as his fingers lingered over the controls. Again David responded, though below a scowl; after a notably quizzical addendum, he cast the Engineer a studied glance. The huge figure responded with a short murmur laced with far more of the sass she'd witnessed since the moment he'd tolerated the android, then returned his focus to the console.

A keyboard of sorts had presented itself, but it was no longer in English; whatever it was, it was unrecognisable to her and certainly not his native tongue, as the series of haphazard taps at it seemed unsure. Unfamiliar. She could only assume he had found a _fourth_ language that served his needs, one she didn't recognise despite her extensive studies into dead, historical languages and cultures.

His scowl deepened after an unquestionably _negative_ bleep erupted from the console once, twice, then a third time after a deep, frustrated sigh. Pausing to drum his fingers against the black expanse below the display, he chewed at his bottom lip as his eyes darted about the console for a protracted moment before having another crack, entering a long series of inputs with punctuated, forced calm.

An affirmative _bleep_. The scowl gave way to a vaguely smug, but clearly relieved quirk of the lips.

After another poke at the display, switching through a handful of modes, he settled on one that looked familiar for reasons she couldn't have predicted. There was no reason to expect to see an octave of musical notes, was there? Surely not.

And yet, having quite deliberately punched in a pattern against the glowing amber buttons that sounded distinctly like a tune, it appeared that was _exactly_ what he'd intended.

Another affirmative _trill_ from the console.

The Engineer had clearly felt the weight of her befuddled stare against him, because after briefly checking the thruster controls, his dark gaze fell upon her her once more. Despite his hunched pose in the cramped confines of the pilot's seat, there was a satisfied calm about him – though, the days she'd spent in his company told her the calm was merely skin-deep. She suspected he was _relieved_ rather than merely content.

His stare lingered as her puzzlement refused to fade, and he eventually leaned forward to glance back out of the cockpit and down toward the barren land below, willing her to do likewise.

She hadn't quite expected the gaping, widening maw of an immense hangar door to twist forth below thick earth, either. It had been completely obscured by several millennia of debris moments before. Even from many metres above it seemed enormous, swallowing an avalanche of dirt and rock as the mighty teeth rolled inward and backward, retracting into the infrastructure of the hangar; its likeness had been utterly terrifying to find herself standing on days before, and seeing the sheer scale of it from above merely reinforced that terror. How she'd run its length whilst missing stitches in her freshly hacked, torn and abused uterus was beyond her. How she'd managed _any_ of her feats since landing on this godforsaken rock was beyond her. For all intents and purposes, she'd been damn-near superhuman until the moment she'd been zipped back up with that searing white goo.

Neither David nor Za'il, she realised, knew a thing about what had happened to her from the moment she'd raced from the Engineer ship in a blind panic to the moment she'd appeared from behind the bar with an axe. David, she was sure, would pester her for details once they had a free moment for any sort of catch-ups. Za'il would likely never know the ordeal he had quite directly put her through.

Strangely, by this point, she almost didn't begrudge him for it.

After punching in another series of tones into the console, pale fingers lingering until it yielded an affirmative _bleep_ , Za'il set about slowly, gently lowering the crippled vessel to the ground alongside the gaping hangar doors. Craning her neck to nervously watch the process, viscerally aware of both the sheer size and the proximity of the immense hole in the ground, she noted the teeth had stopped moving about halfway out, pausing with their mighty tips still lingering over the glinting grey mass within, barely visible in the dying sunlight and the thickening wisps of dust and dirt the incoming storm had begun to whip up.

Her hands had found their way into David's hair, gripping the side of his head with perhaps a little too much force as her other hand threatened to tear the faux leather of the seat bolster. There was no rattle of bottles below, no shattering crockery, no forks and knives bouncing across the impossibly glossy floor beyond the bar. There was no telltale clatter of books falling from their shelves, no creaking and groaning from the overtaxed, half-ruined nacelles. The horizon beyond, heavy with seething, grey clouds drawing closer and closer, was almost perfectly level, rocking back and forth with the most minute changes of pitch as the wounded vessel eased toward the ground, more in control than it had been since its first liftoff, and yet her heart still thrashed in her chest as though she expected to die at any moment.

The scientist within reasoned the past few weeks had taken more than their fair share of her resources, finally manifesting that toll in bizarre, unexplainable physical responses. The rest of her simply shook.

Following a few quiet words from the disembodied head sitting on her lap, Za'il reached across the console and fiddled with several of the controls with a finesse that had dominated this third, far more stable flight. What little pitching and rolling there was quickly ceased with the tweaks, yielding to the sort of buttery-smooth descent one would expect of the vessel brand-new and undamaged.

Even the eventual _bump-bump_ of the landing gear finally touching down amongst a thick, rushing plume of debris was vastly more subtle than previous landings, gently making contact with the planet once more without ricocheting against it and thrusting more expensive liquor against the deck downstairs. How the two men, the lost alien and the beheaded android, had mastered flying the ruined vessel was beyond her.

The lifeboat had barely been _in situ_ for a breath before Za'il had set about powering the engines down, seemingly unaware of his two smaller companions as he went about his business with ritual, military poise. Elizabeth's gaze lingered on his hands, silently observing the immense digits as they plucked at the glowing controls with a familiarity he had no right to express; even with labels stuck to each and every dial, there was _no way_ he could have adapted so naturally and so _quickly_ to technology so starkly different to the incomprehensibly foreign stations she had briefly witnessed aboard his ship. Right? Surely not. Even the most wildly intelligent Human would have needed at least a few more flights to even dream of matching his calculated, precise pace.

The deep rumble of his voice would forever jolt her from her thoughts with startling effectiveness – even without the haunting split-tone roar it took on when raised in anger, there was a timbre about it that simply couldn't pass as _Human_.

Forever, she realised, was another half-day at best.

"We should board the new ship before the storm arrives," David announced from her lap, dutifully translating. She could feel the mechanical muscles below his scalp move against the hair she still had balled in her fist; she released it with a start, taking a moment to smooth it back against his head apologetically.

"We probably should, yes," she mused quietly, shifting in her seat as the Engineer proceeded to clamber out of the cockpit, apparently less interested with elegance than avoiding accidentally leaving the diminutive Human in the same state as her android companion.

David's face once again wound up pressed against Shaw's chest as she followed the Engineer back down the cramped stairwell to the main body of the vessel, then propped against his own with obvious haste as she set about clambering into her pressure suit. With an almighty clatter as he dragged the full suit of armour free of the crate by the door and across the floor, Za'il set about assembling himself in a similar fashion, though he lingered with the helmet pressed between both gloved palms to observe Elizabeth as she fastened the scuffed, scratched dome of her own helmet to its fixings. Her gaze eventually caught his, searching his dark eyes for... _God-knows-what_ , to be honest.

What he did offer was a singular nod as he presented the folded list from a pocket in his armour, then tucked it away again.

A smile erupted, unbidden. Communication had been nigh on impossible between them, both language and cultural barriers leaving the past days plodding along in agonising, calculated steps laden with constant second-guessing and minefield-dodging. For every similarity she'd presumed they had, there were twenty almost insurmountable differences arose to offset each tiny victory. Her threadbare grasp on progress had been thrown into wild disarray with David's reintroduction, with the dynamics so vastly altered she felt herself becoming more of a spectator than a participant in the circus that was her life.

But with one, small, unspoken gesture, the alien, the unknown quantity, the _outright mindfuck_ had gifted her the hit of reassurance she hadn't realised she so badly needed. Language barrier be damned. David be damned. What they shared was _hard bloody work_.

"Righto," she breathed as she crouched down beside the dismembered android, "Time to get going. Sorry again, David. I'm going to have to put you in my bag for transport. We should still be able to hear you, though."

"Quite alright," he offered, his grim, strained smile hardly convinced. "Practically speaking, this would have been far more straightforward if you had finished assembling me."

"I know, David," she sighed as she picked his head up, resting him against the opening in the bag briefly. "I promise, I'll work on it once we're on our way. First thing."

* * *

 

LV-223's gravity was almost identical to that of Earth, she had long since decided. The overstuffed pack dragged at her spine as much as she could have expected, top-heavy with David's head stuffed in last and swaying precariously as she placed one foot in front of the other against the fine dust whipping about her toes, the wind buffeting its bulk about and whistling about the broad curve of her helmet.

Za'il was of course carrying the vast majority of their gear, with two of his own bags slung over his back, a handful of smaller packs hanging from his shoulders, several weapons mounted against his waist, and David's beheaded body draped over his right shoulder. By all rights he was marching across the barren wasteland with several hundred kilos of _crap_ weighing him down, but apparently he missed the memo. There was nothing at all laboured about his gait, though logistical issues had cropped up as he tried to exit the ship with everything precariously assembled about his ridiculously strong frame – the airlock was neither wide nor tall enough, and they had resorted to loading him up outside instead after the majority of his carefully-stacked luggage met the airlock jambs with force and came crashing down. He had been quietly frustrated by the Tetris rigmarole being played in threes, she noted, though he hid it well; he just couldn't hide it from _her_ , with her laser focus on observing his body language in the passing days by now a fine art – even hidden behind a helmet, dragging cruft across an abandoned valley.

Reaching the gaping precipice cut into the land once again left her wondering just _how_ she had managed to traverse one of these monstrous portals the first time. Glancing downward left her head spinning, the rush of adrenaline immediately hitting her veins and leaving her head and hands alike tingling with an aura of surreal energy that, by this point, was as familiar as a sneeze. The last she'd scrambled across had very much been in motion, and she'd sprinted the length of several of its teeth before scrambling headlong into the next emergency. This one, locked in place, simply mocked her.

Unbothered, the Engineer stepped past her and out onto the nearest of the metal arms, pacing along its length almost to the very end as he gazed downward into the maw. Drawing a breath, Shaw finally followed suit with every inch of the caution she couldn't pay the task the first time, eyes boring into the dusty surface and absolutely _refusing_ to see what lay below. If she thought it had seemed an endless journey the first time, sprinting across it with her guts threatening to spill through the ripped, oozing wound in her belly, the march across this expanse felt like an eternity.

By the time she had minced to the edge, Za'il had relieved himself of every bit of baggage, neatly stacking the packs alongside David's body before turning to offer his hands as she began fiddling gingerly with her own. The black depths below swooned as she pointedly ignored them. Perhaps she should have snuck a quick nip of whatever liquid courage was left before stepping out of the lifeboat for the final time.

Scowling, she recalled whose _stupid_ idea this was. What was she thinking?

Za'il had spoken, though his helmet muffled much of what he'd said and the wind had snatched the rest. Had it been in English, there was little doubt she wouldn't have understood it anyway.

Helpfully, his hands quickly took over communicating; he aimed his right index finger at his chest, then pointed it into the gaping abyss below. The packs by his feet were next, followed by another prod into the hangar door. Finally, he pointed directly at her, then back into the hole, then lingered in silence as he calmly observed her.

Seemed simple enough. Throw the packs down to him once he was inside, then leap over the edge and hope he caught her. What could go wrong?

Perhaps her expression was far more stunned than she'd intended; after an extended pause, he heaved a sigh and slowly, carefully enunciated what sounded like a question.

"He asks if you understood what he just gestured," David shouted from within her bag; even then, the thick canvas, the wind, and her own helmet left his voice thin. Distant.

"I did," she yelled over the building breeze. "It's just a bloody long way down."

Dutifully, David relayed her response to the Engineer, whose response was to merely cock his head to the side. He was probably recalling whose stupid idea this was, too.

Elizabeth released a mighty sigh as she pressed her eyes closed. No point in dragging the process on for longer than it needed to be. If she was going to go places no Human had ever been before, she had better get used to all it entailed – superhuman acts and all.

"Alright," she nodded grimly. "Let's get on with it, then."

Little more needed to be said. Nonchalant as ever, Za'il simply turned on a heel and, after briefly glancing into the abyss, then over his shoulder, stepped to the very edge of the arc and crouched before the maw.

The ringing in her ears had quickly risen to fever pitch as she stepped over the bags and in behind him then, as he calmly hopped from the grated surface in one slick movement, crashed to her knees and watched, mouth agape, as her fell into the cavernous hangar below.

It was funny how the sheer scale of machines and their accompanying technology had a way of screwing with her perception. As distant as the far edge of the hangar entrance was, the vast, rolling, intricate expanse of the immense vessel within gave little context to its actual size, let alone its proximity to her – but it was watching the Engineer's body fall toward the ribbons of alien beams and nodes that dumped the limb-shaking, electrifying shot of adrenaline into her veins that had sent her scrambling across the extraterrestrial landscape the first time. Shuddering beneath the onslaught, her legs resisted gravity she watched his descent slow before her through wide, panicked eyes.

Boots hit solid metal with a resounding _thunk_ , the sharp crack echoing throughout the hangar. His entire frame seemingly crumpled upon impact, hands and knees scrabbling at the surface as he rebounded and staggered forward, followed by another _crack_ as his helmet met the Juggernaut's hull.

That, she decided, had been the _least_ elegant thing she'd witnessed him doing to date. Panic subsiding and logic beginning to return, she figured the fall was ten, maybe even twenty metres. He weighed at least double what she did. It was _never_ going to be a pretty process.

With a quiet grunt, he gingerly rolled from his hands and knees to his backside, leaning forward to grip his shins as he shook his head; she was sure he'd muttered something, audience or not.

Shaw watched on as the Engineer finally looked back up at her, releasing another strained grunt as he pushed himself back to his feet with one arm and gingerly took a few test paces back toward the point in which he'd jumped. How he'd shaken that landing off sore but uninjured was beyond her; she was no expert in fall-related misadventure, but her gut told her that while she may have survived the jump herself, it would most likely be with broken bones.

Za'il had raised both hands to gesture at her with a beckoning motion. She reached behind her and tugged one of the straps of the nearest bag, offering it with one hand and pointing at it with the other as she crouched against her knees. He repeated the gesture with a nod.

Nothing for it. Bracing herself against the mighty arc, she hefted the rest of the bag toward the edge, then grasped the strap with one hand as she nudged it overboard, dangling it for just a moment before letting go.

As she'd expected, he darted forward with both arms extended and caught the pack effortlessly with nary a stumble to arrest its fall. After placing it aside, well-clear of anywhere he might trip over it, he gestured for another.

"You're up, David," she shouted over the wind. "Safe travels."

"Do you believe he'll catch me?" The android bellowed back from within the bag.

"He caught the first one just fine." She dragged the bag toward her. "You'll be grand."

Over the second bag went. She could have sworn she heard the android shouting her name.

 _Thunk._ Its weight left him staggering forward, but Shaw was pleased to note he hadn't dropped David square on his face despite an irresistible, perfect opportunity to.

The final large pack followed, leaving him crashing to one knee with its momentum before placing it upon the growing stack. The two smaller bags were hardly an issue either, and though she handled the multitude of heavy weapons with a fair bit of trepidation before dropping them down to him, the disinterested calm in which he caught them suggested he might have done this before.

Drawing a breath, she glanced behind her as David's body fell, caught with a metallic _clunk_ and quickly cast aside by the rest of their possessions. Nothing but dirt and rugged metal stood between her and the lifeboat abandoned nearby.

_Shit._

A bassy, familiarly mangled attempt at her name echoed about the walls of the hangar below. The Engineer beckoned with both hands again. Adrenaline assaulted every inch of her once more.

Elizabeth's hands shook as she gripped the edge of the platform. Her breath rattled in her chest as she swung her legs over the side.

She _knew_ there was only one way off this foetid rock alive, and it was through this very door. She would undoubtedly die if she stayed above. She _could_ die if she slipped through his hands. But she would look back at this and laugh if she just _got on with it_.

With a slick shuffle that belied her terror, she popped over the edge and let the abyss have its way with her.

Even with her heart pounding in her ears, her breath snagging at her throat, the adrenaline flooding the gears of time, her descent was startlingly rapid. Blackness quickly swallowed the edges of the star-shaped orb of daylight above, shrinking from her outstretched hands as she fell backwards into the hangar. She'd barely had a moment to allow the cliché showreel's belching of memories at her before her back and knees collected impossibly solid bands of steel at full speed, enveloping her with a strength that knew no logic. A sudden jolt followed as huge hands clutched her against the convolutions of alien armour and, for a moment, the ground seemed to continue rushing toward her.

As her fingers scrabbled at anything within reach despite the last vestiges of rationality in her mind fighting them, the mighty hands grasping her ribs and thighs tilted her feet-first toward the ground and nudged her upright. Staggering aside as she gasped for breath, she turned to find Za'il on both knees, bracing his hands against his thighs, his helmet level with hers as she stood, bedraggled, before him.

Despite herself, she laughed.

He'd murmured something unintelligible in response, but there was the lilt of restrained amusement in his muffled voice.

"Did you enjoy your trip, Doctor?" A similarly muffled voice rang out from the top-most bag.

She would put money on that comment being David's own, and not a translation.

If she hadn't known better by now, she'd have missed the bitterness in his voice. Not that she could blame him – she _had_ delivered a similar jibe before booting him overboard. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I hope." Reflexively, her right hand groped at the cross buried beneath her pressure suit.

"You may _pray_ we encounter less opportunities for aerobatics, but we _are_ now space explorers."

Elizabeth's face twisted with indignant offense. "Look, I'm getting _quite_ tired of these constant jibes over my faith. Why don't you try and do something more productive with your time?"

"Such as?"

She paused. He had a point – there was little he could do aside from chew his way out of the bag – or at her sanity. Shoulders slumping, she found herself clawing at her helmet in a futile effort to run her hands through the mop on her head. "Sorry. I just...sorry. This is stressful."

"It's alright, Doctor," he soothed. "I do understand your feelings of helplessness, given my current predicament."

"Noted," she scowled.

As his two smaller companions bickered, Za'il had busied himself locating a way in. Not that these vessels were designed to be entered and exited in this manner, mind – a quick pace about the upper hull ended with the Engineer picking up the chattiest of the bags and handing it to Elizabeth, before weighing himself down with the rest of the gear and marching toward the curved, windowed dome at the very middle of the ship's central arm.

Clambering across the ridged, uneven surface of the Juggernaut in the dying light before yet another sandstorm was hardly an activity she could have predicted engaging in, she mused, allowing her mind to wander as her eyes plucked about the alien world surrounding her; here she was, a small, insignificant specimen of Earth, standing on the hull of an enormous alien warship, with the severed head of a questionably-motivated android in the bag on her back, hot on the heels of a malevolent-turned-chaotic-neutral extraterrestrial giant. If only she could time travel and inform her past self. Part of her wondered whether it would be a question of minutes or hours before she'd land in a straightjacket.

Nothing would ever shake the cold, damp foreboding that had hung in her stomach as the _Prometheus_ crew had ploughed deeper and deeper into the abandoned, fossilised Engineer world. Something had felt so overwhelmingly _wrong_ the moment Charlie had pulled his helmet off in a flagrant display of machismo, and stumbling upon the remains of giants hadn't exactly helped. Heck, stumbling upon the remains of a very much _alive_ giant had been the final straw – if only for it bringing about instant Karma. There was little the technology could do to shake the association of death and destruction in her mind.

And yet, she remained insatiably curious. There were stories to be told, societies and cultures to unearth, languages to learn and people to meet – though her experiences had left her vastly more cautious and considerably less naïve, the old Dr Shaw still stared through these wise eyes with slack-jawed wonderment.

She was unsure whether it was the hesitant, seasoned Shaw or the wide-eyed, answer-hungry Shaw that was once again entertaining the idea of becoming a tagalong, risking more drama in the name of learning as much as she could from this one, lone example of an Engineer. Surely their bond, forged in fire and blood, must mean something.

Realistically, though, he was unlikely to allow David aboard his ship. In fact, if she did barge her way on board to travel with him, she was certain David would end up out the nearest airlock the moment they were in orbit. Za'il had made his feelings abundantly clear. The less he had to do with the android, the better.

Besides, he was probably the most inappropriate man she could have found for the job anyway. Soldiers weren't usually the talkative type, and it seemed diplomacy was not exactly his strong point. She had tested his patience as it is; weeks, months on, as familiarity seeped in, would that patience hold?

And then there was the minor detail of his displacement in time. Granted, cultures on Earth evolved at alarmingly rapid rates, with languages and rituals becoming deprecated in cosmic blinks of an eye, but she imagined two thousand years would see significant change even in a culture as ingrained and ancient as she presumed his was. Even if he _did_ calm down and tolerate her for long enough to teach her his ways, she doubted they'd be compatible with modern Engineers.

She _had_ to find out what their race was really called. Perhaps that would be her first task.

Pinning the door code apparently took a few tries – in watching him, she realised it wasn't as much guessing the wrong code as his hand being yanked in strange angles as his overladen bags vied for space on his shoulder with David's body and invariably slid down the moment the opportunity arose. Still, thankfully, the airlock eventually yielded and hissed open – sucking in a breath, she stepped out of the darkness of the hangar and into the cool, dimly-lit lockout aboard the gargantuan vessel.

Za'il wasted little time in keying the second door and marching down the dark, hooped corridor immediately after it; there was a haste about his pace, but there was no way to determine its motivation given the armour beneath his heavy load. She was left scampering in an attempt to keep up.

The Bridge wasn't far away at all, evidently, though the brisk march toward it left her panting somewhat as she struggled to match his pace along the vast hallway to its end, then through a sharp left turn toward the gaping arches leading to a cavernous room that was all too familiar, its form in her mind stained in blood and death.

This one, however, was a far cry from the tainted, disheveled example they'd discussed David's fate within. Aside from a thin film of dust across every surface from one end of the Bridge to the other, its panels were intact and its controls untouched in centuries. No bodies in the corner. No dangling wiring harnesses sparking in the darkness. Not a soul had disturbed this place in a very, very long time.

Dropping his payload by the Captain's chair, Za'il's haste continued as he marched toward the nearest stasis pod and immediately crouched beside it, fingers pressing against the thick cover as he examined it. With his helmet on, it was impossible to discern anything from him as he remained bent over the translucent sarcophagus, but as he stood and strode toward the next, it became painfully obvious what he was doing.

Bodies. He was checking for bodies.

As he bent over the third of the pods, Elizabeth slipped her bag from her shoulders and gently placed it alongside the rest and watched on. It was a curious thing to watch, given his scans had shown nothing during the multiple passes both on board the lifeboat and the bridge of his own crashed vessel; he _knew_ this vessel was unoccupied, yet it seemed he needed to see it with his own eyes.

Not that she blamed him, mind. At the very least, occupying a pod out of necessity that had once housed a corpse was hardly an aspirational thought; it probably also spelled out problems with the unit itself.

The fourth and final pod apparently also unoccupied, the Engineer finally relented in his frantic pace with a heavy sigh, resting his knees against the deck as he reached up to release his helmet. Pressing it between his hands, his dark gaze met Shaw's with an expression written across his pale face that could only be described as relief, immense relief, the likes of which transcended translation. She simply offered a smile in kind, resting back against the Captain's console with her arms folded across her chest. She had to admit, she sympathised.

Drawing a breath, he meandered back toward the Captain's console, pausing a moment to pick at the controls behind her, and as she turned to watch, he pushed aside the stack of bags alongside the monstrous chair and sank into it with a huff.

Leaving him to go about his business, Elizabeth stole a moment to indulge her own curiosity. Each visit to the Bridge of the crashed ship had ended in calamity to the point she had been utterly convinced she would die; it was hardly the sort of environment one had a poke around in.

But that curiosity _had_ been there, hadn't it? And it had, in fact, been the harbinger of disaster each time, hadn't it? If David hadn't awoken the one living Engineer on this horrible planet three people wouldn't have been killed. If she hadn't bothered retrieving his severed head, she wouldn't have been the recipient of that same Engineer's spectacular meltdown. Perhaps if Humans weren't so intent on sticking their fingers where they didn't belong, there would have been less disasters throughout history.

Likewise, she had to admit, there would also be less _discoveries_ with that sort of attitude, too. Perhaps they would still be living in mud huts, hunting with spears, and worshipping the stars.

The logical, methodical scientist within her knew she simply needed to approach things in this brave new world with far more caution. Less poking things, more observing things. There existed standard procedures for a reason.

With that in mind, she found herself content to simply _observe_ the features of this mighty vessel, leaving assumptions at the door and her hands clasped behind her back.

The thin film of dust scattered about the Bridge shifted beneath her toes with the slightest of movement, wisping and swirling about before settling in intricate, silvery trails in her wake. There was no huge, telescopic console sitting in the centre of this room as their had been upon her second visit to Za'il's ship, but to the right of the Captain's post there stood a second, smaller podium that was clearly, at its immense height, intended to be manned standing up. Its interface stood far above her head height, and she hadn't a hope of seeing what was on it – with little more than a quick glance at the intricacies about its foot, presuming it would retract into the floor if commanded so, she let her eyes trail onward.

Light spilling in through the top of the dome above them had a yellow tinge about its greyness, with clearly-formed sunbeams pouring in through the half-retracted teeth of the hangar door and toying with the thick dust whirling in from the planet's surface. It was a detail she'd completely missed aboard the other vessel, though she was far too occupied during both visits to have been staring about the roof in wonder, as she was now.

There was something almost organic about the design of these vessels; there were no bare metal rafters and flat, polished panels like those of the _Prometheus_. In fact, there wasn't a straight edge in sight. It left her wondering if the seemingly hand-crafted, ancient, organic-seeming tunnels throughout the rest of the base, and indeed the towers themselves, were engineered much like these vessels. As strange as the construction was, with no apparent mechanical componentry to hint at its nature, it was clearly far more robust than anything her people had created. The _Prometheus_ had been blown to confetti; the Engineer ship had simply crashed, largely intact.

" _Lee-zuh-beh_?"

Jumping to attention, she turned on a heel to face the source of the shoddy, awkward attempt at her name. Apparently finished with his tasks, Za'il had stood from the Captain's chair and hoisted her bag onto it as he fiddled with the straps.

Sauntering back over to him, she offered outspread hands toward the bag, intending to pick it up; instead he swung it onto his back, fastening the straps across his chest with one hand as he plopped one of the oversized, alien rifles into her outstretched arms with the other.

She stared at it quizzically, then upward at the Engineer below furrowed brows. "What? Why?"

He responded, so she assumed, in his own tongue as he dragged David's body from the ground by an arm, then draped it over his left shoulder.

The android's muffled voice quickly followed from way above as Za'il set about securing the decapitated body to his own with a brightly-coloured strop recovered from one of the other bags. "He says you may need to defend yourself shortly." A pause. "That doesn't sound too positive, does it?"

She pulled a face. "No, it doesn't." She noted he'd picked up a rifle, too. Dread dug at her gut. There was little doubt he was risking his life for her at this point. But why?

Stating something in his own language, he turned toward the Bridge's main door. There was little translation needed as the cold rush of adrenaline once again gripped at every fibre of muscle within her tiny, shaking body.

_Get on with it. Fortune favours the bold._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sweet Jesus, he's still alive.
> 
> I am so, so damn sorry it's taken nearly SIX WEEKS to get this story out. I've had more than a few of you in an is-this-another-abandoned-Last-Engineer-fic panic, and I don't blame you...but no, this isn't abandoned. My schedule is just murderising me. On the plus side, a good three-quarters of this has been written on the brand-new laptop I've been banging on about. So there's that!
> 
> Regarding Covenant, I've not seen it yet. The idea of the horror/gore upgrade from Prometheus has this Trekkie shaking. I'm not afraid of spoilers, though, so no panic there. From what I DO know, I'll be doing some minor canon divergence and calling it fanfiction as this story (or rather, the sequel) progresses, but plenty will remain.
> 
> Given I wrote this all before Covenant came out, how on point was Za'il, eh?
> 
> This chapter is more patchy than I was hoping, and certainly messier than previous chapters, but given it's been assembled in piecemeal over the last six weeks, it's hardly surprising. It's one of the many that will get a serious polish when I re-release.
> 
> To all my new followers, of which there are many, hello! Welcome aboard this crazy ride. I've read every single one of your messages, and I've responded to some, but I just want to say that your kind messages have made my day many days in a row. Your feedback has been one of the key things pushing me to just bloody RELEASE this chapter, and some of the banter back and forth with a few of you has given me some seriously strong foundations for the big universe expansion I have planned further down the track...
> 
> I can't promise the next chapter won't take forever. The hours don't let up. Turns out designers are in high demand. But at least I have the freedom to toddle off with the new MacBook (affectionately named the ClackBook because I type like a Klingon at the best of times) and write in peace, which should get some higher-quality material in everyone's inboxes on a semi-regular basis. We hope.
> 
> TL;DR: not dead. Still typing. Haven't seen Covenant yet, too much of an enormous chicken. Don't spare the spoilers for me, but be mindful of your fellow reviewers!


	16. Incubus

Curiously, it was the little things that caught Shaw's attention over the rasp of her breath in her throat, over the drumbeat of her racing heart against her ears. Pressing the shadows that lurked at her toes from her mind amongst the familiarity of these dark, expansive caverns carved into the rock, her eyes instead plucked at the details she hadn't noticed in her previous few passes amongst crewmates at the other end of the base. She knew crisp, cool, impossibly fresh air flooded these corridors, but she now knew better than to remove her helmet as their entire landing party had done multiple times while they were still alive; rather, she preferred to squint at the powdery white accumulation in the fragments of rock which had softened and obscured the seemingly organic curves etched into the walls. She admired the razor-edge flatness of the path at her feet, though she stole only a momentary glance at the wisps of dust they disturbed with each pace. She idly wondered, as she drank it all in, how it had come to be.

Despite the hulking great tower perched upon the landscape above, her initial response had been to assume it all to be a natural formation – limestone caves, torn into existence by thundering rivers or searing lava, and worn smooth by aeons. She had meandered plenty of these in her time on a far more familiar planet, wide-eyed gaze plucking apart the intricacies carved into the rock over time, experience drawing the man-made from the natural, leading her from one discovery to the next as she planted her footsteps over those placed millennia ago and washed into the abyss.

Even in the darkness, it had quickly become apparent that these walls were too uniform, too deliberate, to be anything other than designed. The mystery of the virgin atmosphere within left little doubt of that, but now that she paced these halls with days – _weeks_? – of wisdom colouring her vision, it became immediately obvious just _how_ uniform they were. At this point, there was little doubt in her mind that they were carved and reinforced by machine. No hands, no matter how large and strong, could have forged these mighty arches into rock.

Still, the moment of realisation in all its black, tarry horror clung to her psyche as she marched through the sweeping right-hander beyond the warship they had left behind. With the very much living, breathing Engineer a mere pace behind her as she pushed forward into the unknown, the crumpled, beheaded corpse they had stumbled upon stained her vision, refusing to leave. Bodies weren't something she had expected to find on this voyage. There was little she _had_ been expecting, but bodies were close to the bottom of the list.

Mind you, so were many of the _other_ things they had found.

Apparently the one, singular corpse she had found wasn't the only one; she recalled Janek mentioning, in passing, the almighty stack of bodies Fifield and Millburn had stumbled upon during their final misadventure, piled impossibly high into a wall of carnage. As much as she would _never_ wish such a fate upon anyone, she supposed it was somewhat fitting that Fifield's reaction to their initial discovery would be met with many more in kind. Had they just stuck together…

...they would have found another way to die, of this much she was certain.

_Goddamn this forsaken place._

The weight of the Engineer weapon in her grasp was substantial, tugging at her shoulders and leaving the familiar warmth of lactic burn in her biceps as she held it against her chest with both hands, but it most certainly didn't feel as heavy as the immense bloody thing _looked_. There was little doubt in her mind it was constructed with vastly bigger people in mind, and although it wasn't impossible to lift, the sheer size of it would without a doubt make it challenging to operate in an emergency.

Curious how the warlike often arrived at similarly violent outcomes. She had absolutely no idea what the weapon would even _do_ when she pulled the trigger, but despite the fact that it was manufactured as far from Earth as she could imagine, it was patently obvious from the outset what it was and how to operate it. A familiar form-factor – one that had stolen hundreds of millions of lives on her own planet, and one she was loathe to have anything to do with.

To that end, Za'il hadn't introduced her to such things until minutes ago, handing it to her with chilling nonchalance just as they stepped from the warship's bridge. Even when threatened with an intruder, he had simply handed her one of her own peoples' flamethrowers as self-defense and gone to task himself. It struck her that not only had he apparently limited his own aggression in her presence – at least, in comparison to his catastrophic awakening – it seemed he'd actively limited her exposure to violence entirely. There was little reason to ponder his motivations; given he hadn't outright killed her when he'd had the opportunity, it was safe to assume a soldier's role here was hardly different to a soldier's role back on Earth, running _toward_ danger to defend the less robust.

Assumption, she was slowly learning, was the mother of all... _you know_.

It left her wondering just how much wisdom was in Janek's assumption that this was potentially a weapons facility. Za'il himself had confirmed her suspicions that it was a military base, but to what end? What _were_ those vials they stumbled upon in that temple-like room? What had they oozed? Had she been given the opportunity to explore, safely, for weeks or months, there was little doubt she would have emerged with a fairly solid idea of what the answers to all these questions were, but that hadn't been how fate had directed her, had it?

The thousands littering the crashed warship's cargo hold left her with few leads...leads that would forever be lost on this nightmarish world, one she was intent on leaving behind as soon as possible given the horrors it had bestowed upon the one, singular _Prometheus_ survivor.

To be fair, that was _exactly_ where they were headed.

Seemingly endless, the immense, snaking corridor sprawled onward with enough monotony that with each step less and less of her focus was on the potential for danger, and increasingly upon her internal musings as she noted the details of the monstrous, sunken doorways that sporadically appeared against the curved walls with patterns etched into their surfaces at seemingly regular intervals, the subtle downhill gradient of the path as it wove deeper and deeper toward the centre of the base.

What was obvious at this point was just how accurate the projections of the base layout had been. The walls undulated in exactly the manner she had noted on the various holograms the Engineer had projected, with doorways smattered here and there as they marched onward and little else. There had been no extra corridors intersecting their path save the one that led back into the base from the two hangars at its outer reaches, just as the map had shown. That, she noted, they hadn't reached yet – the door sealing that path had appeared vastly more significant than those they had passed thus far.

Accuracy was something she could appreciate, as a scientist. The devil was in the details, and Za'il had provided _plenty_ with his repeated scans, an inordinate focus placed upon one singular blip. That devil, as much as she was loathe to think of it, was conspicuously absent thus far.

Just what that pale cyan blip was, she shuddered to think. The lull of blissful ignorance was strong, no matter how much her intelligence begged her to consider the increasing likelihood that it was simply waiting for them further along, to consider the absolute certainty that it, whatever _it_ was, stood between them and salvation.

_We'll deal with it when it comes,_ she told herself again and again, her throat tightening as that time drew closer with every _thud_ of their boots against the dusty path.

As they trudged on in silence, the monotony of the tunnel's increasingly familiar features was briefly broken by the dull glint of a metal pole obscured within an alcove along the left wall. Its surface had withstood the ages but not entirely unscathed, somewhat blackened and tarnished against the dim illumination within as it hung in the shadows beyond the corridor.

Za'il's voice was barely above a whisper, but in the pindrop silence it still echoed against the walls and sent a half-hearted jolt through Shaw's tense body. He silently slunk past her as she froze in place.

"He says to stay still, Doctor," David's voice whispered from within the pack as the Engineer paced forward.

Raising his weapon toward the grimy, lone pole, he tapped at a series of buttons with a finger until it emitted a soft, white cone of light in the direction of the alcove; far too dim to be any truly useful light source, she supposed it was something else entirely that he was trying to achieve. Scanning, perhaps. Regardless, it was enough light for her to see that it was not one singular pole she was staring at but the closest arm of a towering frame, easily taller than an Engineer and broad enough that its expanse filled the nook in which it resided.

Little more than a massive, dust-caked rack, its series of dark, metallic arms reaching toward the roof of the corridor distantly reminded her of the great forks of a logging trailer – especially as, upon further inspection, it appeared to hover a half-foot off the ground, the glint of rusty, circular orbs below suggestive of wheels. For what she could make of it, it seemed to be akin to an immense trolley.

_A perfect hiding place._

Za'il's apprehensive, cautious investigation of the trolley was quite rightfully thorough, blips of cyan flashing before Shaw's mind's eye as her overzealous imagination filled in the blanks in the dim haze of torchlight. There was little space for any creature to hide from his search as he inched closer, examining its underside with a crouch that ought to have been far more awkward given his payload, peering past its bounds against the alcove's wall, pawing at the rear wall with the weapon's thin beam of light.

Finally, after what felt like an age, the mighty Engineer expelled a long breath and flicked the light off with a poke of his thumb. Motioning with the barrel of the weapon, he murmured something in little more than a whisper before marching onward at a pace she would have no trouble in quickly matching.

"He seems to think there was no danger to be found back there," David whispered as she drew level with the pack slung over Za'il's shoulder, "But he insists you keep your wits about you."

"Understood," she replied quietly, easing past and skipping ahead. It was safer for her up front, so the theory went; Za'il had insisted upon having her in his sight for the whole journey, and she found little reason to disagree.

The return to the monotony of the corridor's intricate ribbing was a welcome one, with nowhere for _things_ to hide from their nervous eyes as they resumed their march toward the second hangar. The distraction had served as a timely reminder, she supposed; this place had _always_ been far more dangerous than any of them had thought, and through the razor-sharp lens of hindsight, she could scarcely believe the absurd risks the away team had indulged in. Why had they marched straight into an unexplored structure and yanked their helmets off within moments of arriving on an alien world? Why had she thought it so imperative to explore that vast, uncharted network without weapons? Why had _anyone_ thought it safe to allow the team to split up after discovering an ancient, beheaded, decomposed corpse? _Why?_

All these questionable decisions to reflect upon, though they hadn't felt like decisions at the time – all these unfathomable risks she was now painfully, _painfully_ aware of, and yet, the presence of the most questionable decision's outcome pacing along behind her served as the only reliable barrier she could imagine to that danger. It went without saying that Jackson and his band of gun-toting mercenaries would have simply opened fire on any threat they could have stumbled upon and promptly gotten them _all_ killed. The rest of the _Prometheus_ crew had been even less useful in the face of calamity, save David.

_Oh, David._

He had demonstrated, on several occasions, his superior strength and dexterity over his Human companions. His greater memory and quicker thought processes went without saying, and his purpose – what a concept _that_ was to unpick – was merely to serve. Realistically, he ought to have been that reassuring presence she had long since attributed to Za'il. In fact, upon reflection, she realised that perhaps she _had_ tried to do exactly that in her determination to retrieve and revive him.

Fat lot of good _that_ had done, she mused, suddenly aware of the sound of the limp limbs behind her, the heels of his boots gently tapping against each other with each of the Engineer's broad, languid strides. The android had proven a trivial, momentary irritation for the mighty giant, that much she would never scrape from the forefront of her memory. It wasn't the first time she had considered his inadequacy for the task of exploring space, its relative equality with her own somewhere near the proverbial barrel scrapings, but as time droned on, it became that much more meaningful.

Realistically, the broken body slung over Za'il's shoulder had also proven more trouble than she could have anticipated; as much as he bowed to the demands of one Meredith Vickers and indeed Peter Weyland himself, as much as he appeared entirely composed and unflappable even as the Engineer severed his head, there had been a nagging discomfort about his presence that she hadn't put an awful lot of thought into. Perhaps she hadn't _wanted_ to – but with the looming reality that she was about to be stuck in a foreign, alien vessel with him, alone and dependent on his skills, perhaps she ought to do exactly that.

He had shown utmost obedience toward those he was built to serve. He had saved Shaw's life as she chased the corpse's head from the _Prometheus'_ loading dock with nary a thought for his own life and had been exceedingly polite about the whole ordeal. But in stark contrast to the benevolence he had displayed that day, she couldn't help but circle back to the equally as polite but far more disturbing obsession he had displayed over the _monster_ growing within her.

Come to think of it, he hadn't exactly been good at obeying _her_ orders – just those of Vickers and Weyland. Amongst the wonder and chaos that had ensnared the entire crew from the moment they set foot on this wretched rock, she'd almost forgotten just how many times she'd asked David what on Earth he thought he was doing, and watched on in irritation as he'd either ignored her or murmured something intended to reassure her, and proceeded with his task anyway.

A cold shiver gripped her spine as she marched onward. As much as she intended to simply reassemble her fellow survivor once they were in orbit, somehow she found herself increasingly convinced by the words of the Engineer, a complete – and violent – unknown, over the mysterious motivations of what remained of her own crew.

The monumental arc of the doors leading from the corridor and into the main tunnel toward the heart of the station were hard to miss. They could have easily flown the lifeboat through its reaches with Za'il standing on top of it, and as she craned her neck to observe the intricate details of the hooped frame encompassing its breadth, she had to wonder if that was, in fact, its intention. The corridor itself had gradually widened enough that it might have fitted such enormous things within its significant expanse, as had its second half leading into the abyss before them, but the port they'd entered from was nowhere near as wide. Logistics, she quickly decided, and chalked it up to another mystery she would never gain the answers to.

Za'il had paused to examine its outer reaches with the dim torchlight on the upper side of his weapon, helmeted face craning toward the distant roof to the same degree as hers had; there were far, far less places a creature of any kind could hide here as far as she could see. Anything that could, she reasoned, would be small – far smaller than the screeching behemoth she had watched the Engineer face.

_That I saved him from,_ she quietly corrected herself. _With half my insides threatening to fall out._

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she moved on from the gargantuan doors and into the second arm of the corridor as she was left to consider the ramifications of _that_ encounter, too. If asked of her, she doubted she would be able to pull the same stunt again; how on Earth she'd managed it in the first place was a mystery even to her, given the state of her at the time. Faced with a towering murderer and an abyss of flailing tentacles, by all rights she should have high-tailed it in the opposite direction and left them to it.

Ah yes, of course: she'd been convinced she would die regardless. Far be it for her to ignore the cries of something so very, very _Human_ in the face of certain death.

A deep gasp rattled against the halls as they proceeded onward. Freezing in place, she whipped her head about to gaze upward at the Engineer standing behind her; he too had come to a juddering halt, weapon raised and pointing down the hall.

At a quick glance she noted they'd barely moved on from the mighty doors, their thick frame still visible at its closest edge around the curve of the hall. Before them lay the darkened expanse of poorly-lit hall, shadows cast from the right-hand wall as it disappeared around the corner into an abyss of black–

Those were not shadows.

Those were not bloody _shadows._

Tearing her eyes from the tangle of limbs cluttering the path, she quickly diverted her attention back to Za'il. He hadn't moved an inch, still transfixed upon the ancient carnage before them. It was as though the sight had taken him completely by surprise…

...but _of course_. He hadn't seen what _they_ had seen in their explorations. He hadn't seen any bodies beyond those of his own crew, their fates confined to the sarcophagi on the Bridge of the downed warship. For all he knew, the station could have been evacuated and the ships left idle and full of hibernating crews forgotten.

Another thing she would never know the answer to.

A shuffle of boots against the powdery path had her snapping her gaze back toward her enormous companion. A whisper escaped him, his voice wavering as he spoke. Two more paces toward the pile of bodies and he murmured something further, his voice barely audible beneath his heavy helmet. His grip on his weapon was unsteady.

"David, what's he saying?" She asked near-silently, her knuckles white beneath their gloves as she gripped the oversized rifle in her hands. Stacked high against the wall and into the alcove of a door, the veritable mountain of huge bodies draped over one another lay in a display of wretched, hopeless chaos, twisted limbs splayed across the path in frozen horror.

"He is...expressing dismay at what he's seeing," the android responded. After a pause, he added to the observation. "What _is_ he seeing, Doctor?"

"Bodies," he whispered hastily, swallowing the lump in her throat. "This must have been just like what Fifield and Millburn stumbled upon. There...there must be at least thirty of them."

"Engineer, I presume," David murmured in return. His voice had become somewhat easier to hear through the thick canvas of the bag as Za'il took another pace forward, standing between Shaw and the pile of corpses. "In a similar state of decomposition as the one we found, are they?"

Squinting in the darkness, Elizabeth fought the roiling waves of nausea in the pit of her gut and focused on the carnage before her; several of the hands closest to them, she noted, were little more than pearlescent-white skeletons, the flesh having long since decayed from its bones and leaving thick tendrils of biosuit to collapse over what remained after tissue had turned to dust. Others had, much to her own dismay, apparently been torn from their bodies, leaving the severed remains of bones dangling amongst the tatters of their suits.

She hardly dared to look further, but as curiosity tightened its grasp around her, she stole a glance at the rest of what remained. Amongst the sea of macabre detail was a baffling mix of stained helmets and bare skulls, as though not everyone had managed to clamber into armour amongst whatever panic had ensued two millennia ago; a similar mix of biosuits and the armour Za'il himself currently wore had been scattered throughout, the nightmare of twisted body parts having obscured that observation until she'd resisted the urge to look away for long enough to spot it.

Upon further observation, her eyes caught one final detail that left her blood freezing in her veins; almost every single biosuit, every armoured chest piece, had been torn open as if detonated from inside. Some had the sides ripped out of them by something sizeable, the ribs within shattered along their length, while others had been defiled from beneath the sternum with explosive force.

Something truly ghastly had befallen these poor souls.

Swallowing once again, Shaw scrambled for words. Her voice shook despite her resolve, thin and alien against her ears, hardly her own. "Worse. They're skeletons, some are torn up...they all look as though they were breached from within."

"Breached, Doctor?"

"Something's exploded out of them." She drew a shaky breath. "Something else must have ripped some of them apart after they died."

Za'il's voice, still a whisper, interjected as he reached down and nudged the chest of the nearest corpse with the barrel of his rifle, gingerly drawing a line from the hole torn in the side of the torso to the tattered mess hanging over the vertebrae of the neck. From there he locked up again, his armour barely moving as the breath froze in his chest. Without knowing him she couldn't determine whether he was processing a veritable tsunami of information, or simply dissolving into a state of shock.

At this rate, it would simply land on the list of _yet more_ she would never have answers for.

Taking cautious strides toward the mass of limbs, she hung close to the far wall as she remained transfixed. "David, ask him who they were."

A brief exchange ensued, David's voice impeccably polite and even-toned in contrast to the thin, breathless, staccato response he received.

"They were posted to the station, he believes," the android eventually replied. "But he can only guess as to what they are doing _here_."

Drawing a deep, rattling breath, the Engineer finally stepped past his fallen compatriots, though his rifle remained trained on the path before them. He murmured something in a whisper as he paused on the other side of the morbid sight, momentarily casting Elizabeth a glance.

"He again insists we must leave this moon with haste," David whispered through the confines of the bag, "Should either of you wish to avoid the same fate."

A crippling chill rattled her frame as she followed suit and stepped past, her grip on the alien weapon intensifying. She had to wonder, as much as she'd actively put the concept far from her consciousness, if that was the fate that awaited her had she not resisted the _Prometheus_ crew's attempts to put her into hypersleep. The _thing_ within her would certainly have had the strength to rip her apart given just a little more time to grow...would she have been conscious for those final moments? Something about the harrowed final resting positions of the Engineer corpses left behind her told her that she just might have been.

As the pressed on in silence with a renewed fixation on the microcosm of dust and corridor surrounding them, only one thought nagged at her psyche despite her intense focus. _Should either of you wish to avoid the same fate._

A sick, twisted corner of her mind was left wondering just what David would do should they both perish and leave him as the sole survivor of this ordeal – would be find a way out of that oversized canvas bag, and over to his body? Or would he have the unenviable _joy_ of listening to the pair of them die horrible deaths for the days his cranial batteries lasted, then blink out of existence himself until more unwitting passers-by succumbed to curiosity and stumbled upon this place once more? What would he feel, if anything, as he witnessed their final moments?

There _was_ smugness in his tone as he whispered that off-handed comment, wasn't there?

_Stop catastrophising, Elizabeth,_ she scolded herself as they pressed on. _There's no point in putting words in anyone's mouths!_

There were a few things she would need to discuss with the wretched creature before she agreed to reassembling him. The fact that she was increasingly questioning his motivations was proof enough to her that something was awry, and they would need to agree to a code of conduct between them that both would be comfortable with. There was little doubt he would have points to raise himself, having been subjected to a life of servitude by now, but she _had_ to be comfortable with his decision-making before she could allow it to go unchecked. Though, had their positions somehow been reversed, she would likely find the concept of such a discussion rather offensive as she sat, beheaded, willing to say _anything_ as she waited to be reassemb–

_Skitter skitter._

Despite the impossibility of such a phenomenon, Shaw was absolutely certain that, for a brief moment in time, her blood had frozen in her veins as her heart seized still.

Behind her, the heavy bootsteps had ceased.

There was nothing but complete, utter silence apart from the rapid _thu-thud_ in her chest, pounding against her ears.

Had...had she imagined that sound?

Daring to glance behind her, she found Za'il frozen in place. Feet locked in a broad stance and rifle trained on the hallway they'd just traversed, there was little doubt he had heard it too.

This time, she realised, there was no FTL-capable hull standing between her and the source of the sound. This time, she was left with little option other than to use the weapon pressed between her palms.

_Skitter skitter._

There was no way to tell where the _thing_ was in the darkness. Its proximity was yet another mystery to add to the list. Though, having been trapped in this network of corridors for _God-knows-how-long_ , she doubted it would leave her wondering for long; maybe this was one of the few mysteries she would ultimately discover the answers to.

The morbid voice had returned. _Perhaps this is the way I die._

Over her own heartbeat, she could make out the slow, ragged breaths from within the Engineer's oversized helmet – deliberate and controlled, he seemed to maintain the grip of control over the situation as he stole one pace forward, gaze swivelling about the corridor before the barrel of his rifle. The last of her remaining optimism was convinced his demeanour spoke to the situation's gravity, that whatever _it_ was would be well within his abilities to neutralise. The rest, having withstood a lifetime's worth of horrors upon this planet's sorry surface, presumed he was simply remaining deadpan-calm to avoid sending her into a purposeless panic.

Barely audible, a whisper in an alien tongue permeated her own helmet. In a breath, David elaborated in hushed tones. "Keep marching forward, Doctor, and if you see anything move, call out."

"Alright," she whispered in turn, cringing as her thin, shaking voice betrayed her.

Eyes fixed upon every tiny detail in the hall before her, one foot silently falling in front of the other, she pressed on with a renewed urgency that left every silly musing to date in her wake. Nothing could get by her at this point. If she lost focus, they would _all_ die.

_Pad-pad-pad. Scrape._

Za'il's footfalls had been inaudible since that first sound, she noted, as she briefly shot a glance over her shoulder toward him. Rifle raised in his free hand, he too had turned to glance behind him as he matched her pace.

Shaw found herself swallowing hard, her mouth dry, her throat threatening to clamp shut. At this pace there was little of the hall left to traverse, but it remained inescapable that every pace led them closer to...to…

_Skitter. Scraaaape._

Whispering the same word once, twice, a third time, the Engineer reached down with the hand balancing David's body to gently nudge her onward as he turned toward her, rifle still trained on the corridor behind them. She reflexively continued onward as she offered a nod.

The beads of sweat stung her eyes as they flooded her vision.

Every shadow, every change in the monotonous detail of the corridor, immediately became a threat as she noticed it. Her own rifle held high, its muzzle aimed squarely at anything that grabbed her attention, she suddenly remembered just _how_ she had tackled the monstrosity in the medbay with an axe.

The corridor curved around to the right quite sharply, gradually narrowing to the height and breadth of the airlock doors they had passed through earlier. It wasn't far now; this, she recalled, happened in the latter third of the tunnel before it exited into a hangar.

_Scrape. Scrape._

Barely audible, the sounds were not getting further away. Like the encounter days ago, it was undoubtedly the sound of two incredibly hard substances, one particularly sharp, coming into contact and sliding against each other. _Claws against rock, Elizabeth. It's claws against rock._

The pounding of her heart in her throat did little to drown the sound out.

Was it in front of them, or behind them?

The shadows of the hooped walls leapt out one after another, each falling under the scope of her weapon as they revealed themselves. Something her size could fit in any of those alcoves. Hell, _she_ could probably hide in one of them, briefly.

The dust-caked path before her seemed undisturbed in decades, a perfect film of grey powder coating the hall from wall to wall. The fine particulate whipped about their ankles as they marched toward their safe harbour.

_Leaving a trail. If it's behind us, we're leading it straight to us._

Forcing herself to swallow, she pressed on with the quickest of glances back over her shoulder. The Engineer appeared to be striding almost sideways, his weapon aimed behind him as he scanned back and forth.

_Skitter skitter._

All but holding her breath, she noted the sound seemed _closer_ – but it seemed to come from neither behind or before them. _Where is it, where is the fucking thing…_

_Scrape. Scrape._

The corridor straightened back out again. In its shadows, nothing. No disturbed powder. No movement.

Her grip on her weapon tightened once more.

_Scrape. Skitter. Scrape scraaaaaape…_

_KTHUNK._

Whirling around, Shaw was met with a plume of dust. No more than ten metres away, a mess of sinewy detail faded from obscurity in the middle of the corridor as the powder settled.

In a flurry of motion, the _thing_ unfurled itself from a nightmare of twisted limbs and scrambled into an inhumanly hunched position; in a breath it lurched forward, skeletal limbs propping it up beyond the Engineer's height as it barreled toward them with a bone-shattering _screech_.

The roar of an alien weapon followed immediately thereafter. The flash from Za'il's rifle was utterly blinding, as was the resulting blue-stained bolt of plasma against the enormous creature.

With one hit, the beast staggered backward.

With the second it capitulated, flying rearward and landing with a heavy, scraping _thunk_.

She did not wait for a third before her legs finally reacted. Boots pounding against the dust with an urgency alien to her, the details of the corridor were all but impossible to make out in the haze burned into her vision. The creature was behind her after all. It was behind her, and the hangar before her.

Her breath seared in her chest as she raced onward, the distant vestiges of the scientist within plucking at the horror she had just witnessed. Unlike the behemoth she had carved from her ruined uterus days earlier, it had not been a terror of tentacles flailing mindlessly toward them. It had been humanoid, _undoubtedly humanoid_ , with impossibly thin limbs undeniably arms and legs, its monstrous head towering almost her height again above her. Sickly blue, it was immediately recognisable as the first of the monsters Za'il had drawn; its head elongated and claw-like, a face made entirely of teeth, there was little doubt in her mind it would tear her limb from limb with ease.

Behind her, a third bolt had been fired; its distinctive crackle against the halls ripped at her ears and left them ringing as she charged on. In a heartbeat the sound had been joined by the heavy pounding of far larger boots against the dusty path, and after what seemed only a flash, an ear-shattering, inhuman scream.

As she raced on, the _scrape_ of hardened claws against the path penetrated the static in her ears, only this time, its _rap-rap-rap_ against the ground left little doubt the creature had survived Za'il's weapon. It was pursuing them. And with comparatively tiny legs, she would be the first for it to happen upon.

Resisting every ounce of common sense and daring to glance over her shoulder, she spotted the armoured silhouette of the sprinting Engineer closing in on her rapidly. Through the chaos she was _certain_ he had shouted her name; briefly pausing in her dash as he slid to a halt against the slippery hallway, he raised his weapon and fired it back down the hallway. As the bolt hit the ground and exploded with a _crackle_ she could _feel_ , Za'il suddenly crouched before her.

Leaving her no time to consider his motives, he slammed his shoulder into her gut and swept her upward with frightening force as another tremendous screech echoed about the halls.

As she fought for breath, her grasp on her weapon somehow surviving the assault, she noticed just how much _higher_ she was than the previous moment. Glancing about as a huge hand clamped down against her back, all became clear; he had taken off at a sprint with her over his shoulder.

She doubted he'd intended to knock the wind out of her. He was hardly to blame for forgetting her relative fragility in the heat of the moment. With one arm looped around each smaller body, Za'il had thrown his own weapon down and left it as it fell against the dusty path.

Behind them, the scampering sounds had grown louder. Beyond doubt the _rap-rap-rap_ of claws was drawing closer. What _was_ this creature made of!

A great rumble vibrated against her belly. The entirety of her focus on the creature closing in on them, it took a moment to realise the Engineer had spoken. Voice raised to a deafening bark, he had shouted – no, _screamed_ – something at her repeatedly.

The creature, in all its blue, harrowing glory, had rounded the corner behind them.

With a mighty leap, it transitioned from sprinting on two feet to galloping on all fours.

"Fire, Elizabeth! Fire!"

David had finally translated the Engineer's message, just as the larger man had descended into deafening, angry, quick-fire ramblings.

Weapon gripped between both white-knuckled hands and braced against Za'il's shoulder, Shaw pulled the trigger.

The kickback from the blast almost ripped the rifle from her grasp, the flash staining her vision white as her ears rang. Not a moment later the charge hit, erupting against the path in an explosive flare that ignited the racing silhouette before her in a haze of blue static.

The beast momentarily staggered, hunching before the blast before crying out with a serpentine hiss and launching itself from its crouch once more.

She pulled the trigger again, swinging the barrel an inch higher as she braced herself against the armour below.

Again it missed its mark, detonating in the monster's path. It leaped through the resulting haze with one powerful bound, closing the distance between them once more.

Her third shot hit the creature square in the chest. An ear-piercing shriek erupted against the corridor walls as it crumpled to the ground, reflexively curling its skeletal limbs around the oozing wound in its chest.

Muzzle still trained on the creature as it remained hunched, she watched in horror as, yet again, it forced itself to its feet and took off toward them in a laboured, bipedal run. The rifle was searing hot, the waves of warmth radiating from the barrel even as the Engineer's pace down the hall left wind racing past it. Again she squeezed the trigger, and again, bracing every muscle in her body against the armoured shoulder below as the weapon bucked in her grasp.

The first blast struck the ground in front of the monster. This time it did not wait for the burst to hit it; with an ethereal hiss it thrust itself into the air, leaping over the charge as it struck the path and resumed its pursuit on all fours. The second hit beside it, sending it careening into the wall in a clatter of limbs.

As the creature slowly staggered back to its feet in a woozy haze, Za'il had skidded to a sudden, jarring halt. Elizabeth's heart froze in her chest. They had stopped. Why had they stopped? Why had they _bloody_ stopped?

His grasp against her back relented, the wake of his hand leaving a print of cold-sensitive flesh that spanned the width of her torso. Still they weren't moving. The monster had pushed itself to its feet, pacing forward at a determined march with a profound limp, its sinewy arms clutched against its wounded chest.

The world around her ground to static as she watched the alien monster slowly advance on them. It had backed them into a corner, hadn't it? They had run out of corridor, run out of places to hide, and it would take its dear, sweet time plucking them to pieces. After presumed _years_ trapped in this tunnel, alone, it could have its way with them at its leisure.

This wasn't how she planned to die.

Raising the barrel of the rifle, she aimed for the centre of the creature's chest and squeezed the trigger.

To her terror, the creature let out a hiss and lurched to the side; the blast ripped past it as it clung to the wall with all four clawed limbs, sinew rippling along its skeletal frame as a flash exploded further along the corridor behind it.

Standing back upright, albeit still in a pained hunch, the monster seemingly trained its attention on the rifle with a tilt of its bizarre, elongated head. In the next breath, the most unholy of roars began to echo against the walls as it hunched over further, parting its jaw to reveal a mouthful of pearlescent teeth; apparently straining for the briefest of moments, the roar raised in pitch as...as…

The only way she could describe what she saw was that a _second_ set of jaws had erupted forth, far sharper-looking teeth jutting out of the creature's mouth.

Despite herself, she felt the bile rise in her throat.

Once more, she pulled the trigger.

The rifle bucked in her hands as another bolt of plasma burst from its muzzle. The creature roared as it lunged from the blast, briefly scampering across the dusty path before scrambling forward on all fours. As it advanced on them once more, the room was suddenly in motion; the Engineer's gloved hand had clamped back down on her back as he surged forward, all but knocking the wind from her as his shoulder dug into her torso. Struggling against the far larger man's motion, she aimed at the shrieking horror as best she could and fired once more.

She could swear she heard a woman's scream in her ears as the beast twisted free of the blast and surged forward, closing the gap between them on all fours as the Engineer sprinted onward.

It was almost on top of them, _God_ , it almost on top of them.

And as soon as it had appeared, the beast disappeared with the resounding _slam_ of metal doors right in front of her nose, almost clipping the barrel of the rifle in the process.

A second set of doors slammed shut in the blink of an eye as Za'il kept running, the air in the enclosed space thumping against her beneath his grip.

Her rifle remained trained on the creature, never wavering. They would not die like this.

They would _not_ die like this.

The room around her twisted and shook, and beyond the ringing in her ears, the pounding in her throat, she found herself standing on her feet. Weapon raised, she remained transfixed on the steel-black door, ready to pump plasma into the creature until one or both of them finally dropped. Her boots were welded to the path, her finger to the trigger. She would not die like this.

In the back of her mind, a man's deep, panting voice was talking, his words incomprehensible. It was all irrelevant, totally irrelevant; any minute the creature would catch up to them, and she had to focus on that.

He kept talking after a pause. Somewhere in all of that was her name, she was sure of it. But she was busy trying not to die; they could wait.

Distantly, a more familiar voice echoed about the halls; his, too, called her name. Her grip on her weaponed tightened yet again as her breath echoed throughout her skull. Any minute, now.

The first voice, far deeper, spoke again.

A third voice entered the fray, its words borderline incomprehensible, and yet, clear as day. Through her fixation on the door, desperately awaiting beelzebub as the rifle shook in her grasp, its words echoed about her head meaninglessly as time slowed to a trickle before the barrel of her gun.

"Warning. One minute of oxygen remaining."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, shit. It's been ages YET AGAIN. But you should all know me by now...I take a long time, then whinge about how hard these chapters are to write. Truthfully, there's far more fun parts of their story I can't WAIT to get on with...but at least we're now up to the final chapter of TWFF.
> 
> On that note, the next one will take a while to come. I'll be releasing two follow-ups alongside it, so I've realistically got three to line up before pulling the trigger.
> 
> As a side note, having done a lot of reading around and battling my inner Trekker, I can safely say we're going to diverge from canon to a noticeable degree. Too right this is fanfiction, and at this point I reckon I can do at least a more interesting take than the canon writers, and probably insult reader/viewer intelligence less as I go. But there are few die-hards that actually read fanfiction, so who really cares.
> 
> I absolutely love reading your kind words, thank you to everyone that leaves comments. AO3 has been great for me being able to actually INTERACT with you all (the poor mites on FF are limited to bombing my inbox), and I've thoroughly enjoyed the rather intellectual banter with many of you in the process. I do respond to PMs as well, especially while I'm taking my dear, sweet time posting.
> 
> But yes. Final chapter is coming, but there's a few other bits and bobs to launch at the same time for linking purposes and so that y'all have something fresh to sink your teeth into, so it may be a month or two away.
> 
> PS: I legit feel bad for the Deacon here. Cannon-fodder isn't my style either, and I had a whole world for it to interact with, but alas, it is not our protagonist!


	17. The Gears of Fate

Emotionless, endlessly polite, the voice of the suit's computer fell upon deaf ears as every ounce of her being remained trained on the door. Though her feet were welded to the floor, in a heartbeat she was ready to bolt. Her legs were coiled springs, her finger against the trigger a fuse waiting to pop.

Damn them all to Hell, they _would not die like this._

The voices behind her continued in a clamour of pointless noise, the deeper of the two sounding more and more urgent as sweat trickled from her brow into her eyes while the other, muffled and distant, spoke with a far more gentle tone.

There was a persistent ringing in her ears as every resource she owned awaited the arrival of the monster on the other side of the door, breath rasping in her throat, her body quaking from terrified overuse. And yet, the rifle seemed so light in her grasp.

"Warning. Thirty seconds of oxygen remaining. Recharge suit oxygen levels immediately."

The deeper voice persisted amongst a flurry of footsteps, followed by the higher-pitched of the two. There was little to tie them to reality as they floated about her, mere smoke trails in the dusty path in which she stood, squinting in the dark, eyes desperately seeking the slightest of movements amongst the convolutions of the alien corridor. Dust had settled in the shape of footprints far larger than her own, but they were not those of the creature.

It was taunting her.

The distant rattle of a zipper being torn open barely registered as she remained locked in place in the corridor, weapon still raised. The voices continued, far closer this time; the gentle one sounded less muffled as it called her name, and the deeper one, she realised, was looming over her from behind. Why were they not focusing on their doom? Why were they not preparing to fight the sickly-blue monstrosity? They _couldn't_ die like this.

The corridor seemed to close in on her as seconds ticked by, suddenly claustrophobic in its confines.

"Warning. Fifteen seconds of oxygen remaining."

The searing light seemed at odds with the dark corridor; was she still in the tunnel system at all, or was this the lifeboat? Abruptly, she was no longer sure. It _seemed_ like the lifeboat in its cool, artificially-lit haze, but the door looked nothing like the airlock aboard the small, crippled vessel.

Behind her came a tempered, cautious breath and the _clack_ of armour against the metal deck.

In the blink of an eye, two enormous hands had gently snaked up her forearms. _What on Earth…_

Recoiling from the touch, she watched in horror as the hands slid forward and grasped the rifle in her grip, then sharply wrenched it forwards; her fingers clamoured desperately for it, but it was too far from reach. Her back slapped against a solid surface amongst the chaos, unsure whether she was flailing toward the weapon or away from it – all she knew was that the blue horror would surely be upon them any moment now, and she _had_ to defend herself…

"Warning. Oxygen depleted. Recharge suit oxygen levels immediately."

Icy realisation gripped her chest as the air in her suit quickly became stale. Wide-eyed with startled fear, her gaze whipped about the room as she pivoted on a heel; the door she stood before was unrecognisable, the room beyond it an unfamiliar grey dome with few intricacies etched into the rising, curved walls from featureless, near-black flooring. The Engineer had risen to his feet behind her, whisking the weapon further from her reach and casting it aside with a sharp _clatter_. Without his helmet, his furrowed brows and wide eyes were a picture of near-panicked concern. David, however, perched atop the bag he arrived in, had a studied scowl etched into his features, but was notably, frustratingly calm.

Each gasp for air became more laboured as the air grew thin and foul. Heat rushed to her cheeks as she began to sweat profusely, fingers clawing desperately at the oxygen port over the chest-piece of her suit. She was going to suffocate in this blasted thing, nowhere near the lifeboat and with no one that could help her.

Za'il had sunk back to his knees again, hurriedly barking something at David as he clamped one hand over her shoulder and pulled her closer with enough torque to pull her off her feet. She was faintly aware that her tongue was poking out of her mouth with her increasingly frantic gasps as she staggered toward him. This would make for an ugly corpse.

She had been right, in her inexplicable delirium. She would not die at the hands of an alien monster.

David had said something in the Engineer's tongue, but as the room began to sway, she could only focus on the huge, rough fingers fiddling with the base of her helmet. Wait, was he going to remove it? On an alien world, with the sort of air that would _kill her_?

She snatched at his fingers with a whimper, eyes darting about the room again in search of oxygen reserves. She'd packed them in the bag with David. He was _right there_. All she needed to do was break free and get to them…

A frustrated growl rippled through the room as a mighty hand clamped down on her hipbone, rocking her against her unsteady legs. The other resumed its fiddling as she reached outward, pointing a feeble finger in the direction of the bag. Her voice was little more than a rasp. "In there, in there!"

With a familiar _bip_ , the helmet's mechanism unlocked; in a heartbeat, both Za'il's immense hands were pressed against it, yanking her forwards as he twisted it free and ripped it from her shoulders.

Fresh, cool air flooded her lungs in an instant, and she found herself loudly, reflexively gasping at it as she collapsed forward, fingers digging at his armoured chest as she crumpled. Firm hands pried her loose by the biceps moments later, steadying her as she wobbled on her feet and resisted her scrabbling, dazed grasp.

_What...what the Hell had just happened?_

With nothing but the sound of her own roaring gasps for air in her ears, she steadied herself as she swayed, glancing about the room once more, arms hanging limp beside her. Both sets of eyes were upon her, silently observing as she scrambled for composure.

Pausing to tug his gloves from his hands, Za'il looked her up and down for a drawn moment before grasping her upper arms again and gently, _gently_ shaking her. He'd murmured something in earnest, and she could only assume it was to express his concern given the matching expression written across his face. He paused to glance at the weapon he'd thrust aside before muttering something else. She all but fell into the black of his stare as he looked her dead in the eye once more.

Her fingers tingled as she shakily raked the matted mess her hair had become from her face, distantly aware she was slick – no, _sopping wet_ – with sweat. Za'il had returned to the matter of the rifle as she gradually returned to reality, plucking it from the ground before hunting about a series of hidden panels not far from the airlock for an appropriate place to stow it. He'd said something, and before she could scrape up the words amongst her racing breath to query David as to what the _ever-loving Hell_ was going on, the android elaborated. "Elizabeth, the creature is outside the vessel. It can't get to us in here." He offered a saccharine smile. "We'll be alright."

_Vessel,_ she mused silently as the gears turned. Then it finally dawned on her. The _entire point_ of all this planning, prepping and panicked running was to get to the abandoned Engineer vessel buried underground! Swallowing hard as she sought to regain at least _some_ dignity, she responded to the android – though her eyes were upon their larger companion. "You're certain?"

"Absolutely," David enthused. "Our friend insists we preflight and launch the ship, after which he will give us a brief tour."

Za'il murmured something as he half-turned to face her; it was familiar, although not as familiar as the _infernal apologies_ that had littered their interactions days earlier. Given the concern still pressed into his pale features, she assumed he was asking her if she was alright. A feeble smile was all she could think to offer in response as she ruminated those apologies and her indignant responses to them. At this point, a few of those would slide down a little more easily than they had.

_What_ had _just happened?_

Squeezing her eyes closed as she drew a long, measured breath, the chaos that had enveloped and constricted her briefly threatened to return; the long, endless tunnel seared into her eyelids oscillated wildly between immense, arching blackness and the gunmetal-grey steel of the lifeboat's airlock, never sure quite what it was, but surging forward with relentless pace regardless. Even as her boots remained glued to the ground, she felt as though she was still sprinting from death; even with her eyes pressed firmly shut, she still saw panel after panel screaming past her in a whirlwind of frantic motion.

She _was_ going crazy, wasn't she?

As the Engineer reached down to pack the severed head back into the pack it came from, David had briefly offered the most polite of verbal resistance – while the words were entirely alien, his facial expressions were easily read – before yielding with a dramatic sigh as he disappeared amongst canvas.

"You'll finally reassemble me once we're enroute, won't you, Doctor?" His voice was muffled by the bag, but the plaintive indignity oozed through. There was a faint _clunk_ as his head met his shoulder, the Engineer apparently disinterested in taking any real care of either item of luggage as he hefted the lot onto his back with a nonchalant swing.

"Of course, David," she enthused with a reassuring grin he could not see, a grin that was perhaps more for her own sake than his; with it came a discernible chill, albeit not an unpleasant one, drawing her from the enormous arches outside and back into the silvery, brightly-lit dome of the smaller Engineer ship's interior. Its sparseness, almost clinical, was a welcome change. There were, upon refreshed observation, next to no places a creature of the monstrosity's stature to hide; this room, this bare room, contained nothing more than herself, the Engineer, her pack, and the pieces of android, and with the curved bulkheads reaching above her featuring little apart from flat surfaces and thin, metallic ridges between them, she doubted she'd find anything as small as hitchhiking spiders here, let alone whatever the _Hell_ had pursued them.

The Engineer had murmured something softly as he meandered toward the hallway leading away from the room, beckoning calmly with his free hand; as he nudged his helmet and gloves toward the middle of the room with a boot, she did the same with her own, reasoning she would retrieve it later when she was in a far more assembled state, and fell in behind him as he entered the arched, dimly-lit corridor leading from the dome-shaped room.

Everything about this vessel seemed different from all she knew of the Engineers so far. There had been a distinct style about the huge, snaking corridors below ground that Za'il's warship had shared, with the intricacies etched into many of the surfaces appearing almost organic in nature and yet oh-so-deliberate, steeped in meaning and yearning to be decoded. The darkness that accompanied them had been consistent enough to be assumed, and yet, here she was, almost _squinting_ in the light that flooded these pale, silvery hallways.

That light, she noticed, seemed to follow them as they progressed through the hall; spreading an ambient glow from hidden recesses in the curved bulkheads, the corridor ahead remained in near-darkness until they drew close, then faded behind them as they passed by. _Makes more sense than lighting the entire ship_ , she mused as she shadowed the Engineer in silence. Pleasingly, little of it was more than gentle diffuse illumination, and any harshness was absorbed by the dark, matte flooring. The very definition of utilitarian, this vessel seemed destined for vastly different work than the two warships she'd visited thus far.

There had been doorways along the subtle gradient of the corridor, their arched frames dark and largely devoid of decoration, the smooth, grey doors themselves vaguely reminiscent of what she was used to seeing aboard the _Prometheus_. Other paths had split from this one, wandering in a perplexing series of concentric radii to and fro. Distantly she hoped there were maps of this blasted thing; the layout was unfriendly to a mind as scrambled as hers presently was.

Before long the corridor abruptly ended in a sprawling arch, opening out into another dome-like room. Its upper third to its apex immediately drew her eye, enshrouded in glossy black above more dull, silvery bulkheads; once more she was reminded that, while at least structurally similar, this vessel was notably different to Za'il's. The apparent lack of straight lines was one point they shared in common, in contrast to the ship she had arrived on board, but scale – in this case, an apparent lack thereof – was one thing they did not.

To the right of the corridor's terminus sat a scooped, oversized chair enveloped by an expansive, crescent-shaped console; immediately in front of it, a structure she did not recognise. The base, perhaps, appeared to be an almost organic, sweeping curve arching from left to right before the huge chair; much of the rest of the structure pointed upward in a telescopic barrel. Needless to say she could make neither heads nor tails of it, particularly in her present, exhausted frame of mind, and would sate her curiosity later.

Content to watch from afar, uninterested in straying far from the exit back into the hallway, Elizabeth quietly tugged the sticky, salty mess of hair from her face as she watched Za'il prop the bag and android body against each other between the central structure and what she could safely assume was the Captain's console. Spinning it around, the Engineer sank into the enormous chair with an unceremonious huff, a couple of calm, deliberate pokes of his fingers bringing life back to the long-dead, dust-caked interface.

Except, with him sitting in it, that chair wasn't so enormous, was it? The narrow curve of its broad back barely reached above his head, and as he swiveled it about, she noted its base came nowhere near the backs of his knees. More than anything, the union had made _him_ look less than enormous, too. And yet, should she clamber into its vast base, she would be all but swallowed whole. The omnipresent nag in the back of her mind had cleared its throat, making sure she never forgot that she was dabbling in matters vastly beyond anything she had a right to. She would have to grow used to existing in a world where she was utterly, unquestionably inadequate for the task.

He had said something, she realised, noting his dark focus was upon her as his fingers lingered above the console. Brow furrowed, she stepped toward the pile of dismembered android as he patiently observed her. "David, what's he saying?"

"He's asking if you're alright, Doctor," he replied in a pleasant tone.

"Oh." _But of course._ Offering the Engineer another forced smile, she crouched by the bag and began wrestling with the fastenings. "You can reassure him I'm fine. I just...I just need a rest once we're underway. It's going to take a while to process everything that's happened here – it's been a long day."

"Understood," David enthused as she pried his head from the bag. She assumed he was passing the message along as he spoke, briefly, in Za'il's language.

Rather than respond, the pale giant simply gazed across at her, seemingly chewing at his lower lip in thought for a moment before pressing himself to his feet with a huff. Rotating the chair toward her, he gestured his other hand toward it before saying something, his gaze still fixed upon her.

Drawing a breath, she hefted herself up into the chair as it swiveled about below her knees; as apparent as it had always been, these were not designed for Human backsides. The curve swallowed her wherever she tried to sit, leaving her awkwardly crouched no matter her position. Finally settling in a cross-legged slouch toward its rear, she watched in silence as Za'il reached down to grasp David's head between two large hands and marched toward the structure in the middle of the Bridge.

After a brief exchange, the Engineer swung himself into the central, low-slung section of the unrecognisable structure, perching David's head against his chest as he all but completely reclined against its surface. In the name of assumption, she reasoned it must have something to do with navigation – little else was critically necessary aboard a starship, and she was currently occupying the post that would apparently perform every other function.

As the two bantered between themselves, the incomprehensible language lost its grasp upon her and her attention gradually fell to the array of buttons, displays and dials littering the console before her; it was slowly, gradually dawning on her that this vessel would be her home for the next indeterminate stretch of time, and she had better become familiar with each of these quickly if she intended to survive her next adventure.

A dull rumble echoed throughout the halls and through the base of her chair, its depth such that she felt it in the pit of her stomach rather than heard it. Across the room Za'il seemed notably busy, with both hands flying about the overhead console with expert calm before David's intent, steely gaze – it would have made for a humourous site at any other moment, the severed head resting against the armour of the immense creature that had wrought the damage in the first place, apparently deep in matter-of-fact discussion regarding what she imagined must be ship operations.

The rumbling gradually raised in pitch to the point she could finally hear it. She watched with distant interest as it jarred the thin veneer of dust from the console before her, drawing her eye to the plethora of lights beneath the round, bulbous buttons along its expanse; there were, upon second glance, inscriptions in the surface of some, but not others, that she would undoubtedly become more familiar with over the next... _God-knows_. Right now, the question of her future was one for the back of her mind. Right now, they had _surviving_ to do.

Or did they? By this point they were about as safe as they'd been for days and days. They were no longer aboard a crippled vessel, and there were no unwanted guests aboard this one. The Engineer and the android were in the process of beginning their escape from this world, on the cusp of leaving the death and destruction of the _Prometheus_ behind them.

And, she mused, after all that had happened, she had at least established that the pale alien was an ally.

But for how long?

_That_ was another thought she quickly relegated to the back of her mind.

"Doctor, we are about to leave the hangar; are you ready?" David had raised his voice to the verge of shouting over the rumbling din of the ship's engines.

"Yes I am," she called out as her fingers scrabbled at the edges of the Captain's chair. "Let's get on with it."

In the next breath there was a thunderous increase in the noise that flooded the Bridge, followed by a discernable lurch that momentarily pressed her down into the seat; for all that she could tell amongst the persistent rush of air outside, the creaking and groaning from the bulkheads as the dormant vessel shuddered to life after more than two millennia, they had wasted little time in simply _getting going_.

The flurry of activity, she noticed as she stared, had at least some rhythmic tie to the occasional shift in direction she could feel in her gut. With no way of seeing what was going on beyond the Bridge, the swaying changes in motion had begun to leave her feeling somewhat queasy; reasoning she could ask David about piloting the vessel at a later date, she opted to follow some old advice she'd heard in passing many years ago, riding out the increasing green-gilled waves of motion sickness by pressing her eyes closed and simply _imagining_ what was going on outside by the movements she felt.

If the complicated route out of here was anything to judge by, it was now obvious why they hadn't simply dropped in as they had hours earlier with Za'il's chosen vessel. It felt as though they had slowly, carefully been snaking their way out of a parking building, though she was left wondering just how they got the blasted ship _in here_ in the first place. Navigating in and out of an underground network seemed far more complicated than it was worth, surely.

A distinct yellow tinge had permeated the room beyond her eyelids. Blinking her eyes open, she squinted through the golden, dusty haze toward the Engineer and the android; beams of light had erupted through the glossy upper section of the grey dome, the hallmark of sunlight attempting to cut through the thick layer of dust and debris caking the exterior of the vessel. The afternoon sun! They were finally outside, free of the base. She shifted in her chair as she heaved a relieved sigh.

The vessel's roar, she noted, had also somewhat dulled as she stared upward at the murky edges of clouds hiding beyond the film coating the glass dome. Much of it, she reasoned, must have been from navigating a confined space.

Finally, a deep _thud_ nudged her from below, echoing throughout the Bridge and down the halls leading from it. An unfamiliar, despooling whine followed as a potent stillness engulfed the room, the Engineer's hands gradually slowing against the console above him. He had, she realised, been speaking to David throughout the flight, but as the _thrum_ died down, she could finally hear them.

"Doctor, we're about to take a tour of the vessel," David enthused as the Engineer sat up and swung his legs free of the navigation array. "Za'il would like to show you the amenities you'll find useful during our travels."

"If there's a shower and a warm bed among them, I'm all ears," she grumbled, staggering down from her awkward perch before running her hands through her rather bedraggled hair once more.

David had apparently passed on the sentiment. A snort of laughter had escaped the pale alien; he shook his head with amused disbelief as he handed David to her.

Without another word, Za'il had simply motioned for her to follow him with one hand before heading back out into the corridor that led them to the Bridge, sauntering down the first right-hand intersection they happened upon and continuing in what she realised was in fact a concentric arc, as she had previously surmised, tracing the rotund curves of the ship's exterior. Perhaps it was the persistent, nagging state of arousal that refused to leave her, but this ship felt _particularly_ small; there was little to each curve in the path before it merged into the next, the bare panels racing by as she marched to keep up with the Engineer's pace – even if he seemed to be deliberately taking his time.

The hallway widened as they came upon an intersection. As tall as these corridors seemed to her, their arc more than double her height at their apex, this section seemed even bigger, having risen a foot or two to make way for a sprawling archway in darkened gunmetal; beyond it stretched a broad, circular room, peppered with oversized tables and chairs that immediately presented a predictable problem: they were far, far larger than she was.

Glancing between her and the furniture beyond, Za'il had potentially made the exact same observation. There was a faint quirk about his lips that, by now, she recognised as heralding such thoughts.

With no mind for wasting time he'd wandered over to a nondescript port in the far wall, motioning for her to follow as he poked at the console next to it. Though she understood not a word of what he'd said as he pointed slowly and demonstratively at different sections the panel as they appeared, the mystery quickly unraveled itself as, with a faint electrical hiss, a bowl of _something_ appeared out of thin air, at first presenting as beads of white light swirling about a concave shape, then settling into the form of something vastly more tangible. _Fascinating…_ it appeared to be a significantly more technologically-advanced take on a food dispenser.

"This is a food replicator, from what I can roughly translate," David observed from his position cradled between her arms. "He believes it can be programmed to show images rather than text, as ours did, but doubts it will be particularly useful."

"I had wondered about that," she mused aloud, "Given there's not a lot to compare against between our cultures. Sweet and savoury, salty and spicy, it's all rather challenging to figure out just by _looking_." She paused a moment. "Heck, there's so much variety even on Earth as to what's appropriate for breakfast, and what's for dinner."

"Time to experiment with new things," he offered.

"Just as I was getting bored with food from home," she grinned.

Tracing the curved wall as he sauntered onward, Za'il appeared to notice the row of bottles lining the dark, scooped shelves; after a breath he murmured something softly, reaching up toward the second-highest of the shelves, tracing his fingers over several of the bottles before lingering over a slim, purple-hued example. Pulling it down from the shelf, he stole a moment to blow the dust from the bulge beneath its neck, then tugged the metallic fastening from it with a tell-tale _ponk_ that reminded her, unsurpsingly, of home.

After taking a casual sniff, he reached downward and offered it to her, aiming the neck toward her nose; glancing up at him, she leaned in and inhaled.

Just how it had remained liquid after all these years was beyond her, but there was no questioning the sweet, fragrant aroma that met her was alluring. Perhaps there were perks to taking this vessel after all.

After re-capping the bottle and placing it on a lower shelf within Human reach, Za'il motioned for her to follow once again and led her from the domed room and back out into the corridor. Onward they wound through the tight maze of hallways and intersections; she was left wondering just how she would memorise the layout of this rabbit-warren of a ship, having grown accustomed to the far more perpendicular design of the _Prometheus_ , and the open plan of the lifeboat. This vessel, at least, exuded the no-nonsense feel of Earth's vessels, even by way of colour and notable lack of ornate detail.

Their next stop, apparently, was a pair of arched, metallic doors that slid open almost silently as they approached. Hardly the hemispherical expanses of the Bridge and the Galley, this room was far more of a box and featured little other than two opposing walls of square, ridged panels, and a console above a sizeable slot facing the door they had walked through.

Za'il had begun talking, and once he had David's attention, set about poking buttons on the console and pointing out different sections of the pale blue text it presented him with. She had to wonder what on Earth could be so important about such a small, featureless room – granted, it was hardly claustrophobic to someone of her stature, but it certainly felt rather busy being crammed in here alongside a nine-foot-tall alien.

"Ah, I see," the head in her arms began after a moment, "This is...I don't know how to translate it, I'm sorry, Doctor. But it is another device that creates matter out of energy. This specific unit creates clothing to the size of the wearer – including the civilian version of the suit he is wearing."

Shaw wrinkled her nose. "I'll be damned if I'm going anywhere _near_ a stasis unit any time soon. But good to know."

For some reason, that very moment only served to remind her of how she was very nearly forced into a stasis unit aboard the _Prometheus_ by David himself – if nothing else, it sought to steel her resolve in avoiding them entirely.

Another thing to discuss with him once in orbit.

Several other rooms of minor note passed by as they meandered the halls, Za'il pausing to point out the crew recreation lounge, a small cargo hold, the shuttlebay – although, he had noted with amusement, missing its one, singular shuttle – and the engine room. The latter, apparently, would need little to no attention from either of them. She felt David make a face beneath her hands as he repeated the Engineer's remark regarding the low likelihood of them understanding the technology anyway.

The last room they stopped by was, according to Za'il, the late Captain's quarters. Stepping inside, it appeared significantly more utilitarian than she had expected, its curved walls as featureless as the rest of the vessel apart from a light over the enormous bed that glowed a deep purple and cast geometric patterns against the bulkhead above it. There was little else in the room apart from a plush reclining chair – vastly too large for her, beyond doubt – and a long, low glass table against the far wall. There were no windows, no skylights and no decoration, but it hardly surprised her.

Za'il had set about tearing the bedding from the mattress as she continued to explore, shifting David within her grasp as her arms began to complain about the constant weight; not far from the main door she found a second, and as she approached it, it retracted back into its alcoves to reveal what she could only assume was an ensuite.

After a quick word from the other end of the room, David's translation confirmed that theory. "Bathroom, Doctor."

"I was hoping we'd encounter one," she remarked with a wry grin.

Another comment followed from the bedroom, and after brief banter backwards and forwards, David continued. "He believes the shower won't be as nice as the one aboard the lifeboat; I believe this one uses inaudible sound waves rather than water." He paused. "Remarkable technology."

She couldn't help but release a disappointed sigh. "Not what I was hoping to hear, but it'll have to do."

"Quite right."

Turning back toward the bedroom, she noted a pile of ripped, half-disintegrated, powdery sheets in a pile in the middle of the floor, while Za'il had set about rather tidily making the bed with fresh bedding. Two thousand years, she mused, must not be kind on plush surfaces, even in a stable, inert environment such as this.

The halls leading back to the Bridge, in comparison, seemed borderline pristine; the wispy film of dust each footfall disturbed would soon be swept aside with regular-enough use, she figured. It would be the least of her problems.

At the other end of the scale was the Engineer's demeanour. She had noticed his moments locked in thought drawing out as they explored the vessel, the lingering stares, the increasingly regular sighs as he fought for words in silence. Admittedly, she wasn't much better as she forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand, refusing to allow herself to muse the inevitable that lingered closer and closer; this ship, this strange, alien ship, would be her new home for an indefinite period going forward, and it was _that_ she ought to give its due respect.

But onward the drumbeat of loss pounded, tugging at the lump forming in her throat.

Why was it _David_ she was exploring the Galaxy with?

The march back to the Bridge had been in stony, deafening silence. Heat stung her cheeks as she stepped through the archway behind Za'il, desperately wrestling with a clamour of thoughts racing to find ways she could have the android and Engineer tolerate each other and leave in just one ship.

The heat intensified as she realised just how _selfish_ that thought was; he had far different goals once in orbit. She had no right to his presence. She ought to cherish it rather than presume it.

And yet, after so much time confined in each others' company, the _still_ knew so little about each other.

And forever it shall remain.

Biting back on the rising wall of emotion, she continued to the navigation console and placed David's head against the flat, cushioned surface below the overhead console. How absurd; there was no point in getting tied up in knots over someone she'd barely gotten to know – particularly someone she couldn't even bloody _understand_.

David's body swiftly joined his head by the navigation console, the Engineer placing it below the tattered remains of his neck with a familiar lack of grace before pacing away, exhaling heavily, lingering about the centre of the Bridge momentarily before distracting himself with the Captain's console.

Elizabeth found herself barely able to look at either of them, instead watching flecks of dust dancing in the rays of golden light the roof of the dome allowed in. It seemed like the most twisted, counterintuitive concept to have intruded upon her yet, but in the strangest way, she already missed the moments huddled aboard the lifeboat, staring out at the truly immense mountains beyond, quietly enjoying the ethereal presence of the pale-skinned giant she'd awoken from millennia of slumber, trying her damnedest to unpick the mysteries of the universe from the confines of this foetid world. If anything, she regretted not living in those moments nearly enough.

Regret was as toxic a notion as it seemed.

Why was it that she refused to live in _this_ moment?

Drawing and expelling another heavy breath, the Engineer finally pushed himself away from the Captain's console, gingerly sauntering toward her as she stood dumbly in the middle of the Bridge. There was an undeniable intensity about his dark gaze as he remained transfixed upon her, drinking in every detail – there had been a time where she had ruminated on his determination to all but ignore her, but right now, she felt all but bare as she remained the one, singular thing in the universe before him.

Swallowing hard, he sank to one knee before her, resting a hand against the other as he continued to observe her. The haze in the air did little to diffuse the afternoon sun, staining his skin with a golden glow; determined to commit every detail to memory, she allowed herself to pluck over every inch of his face – so alien, yet so recognisably _Human_ – and marveled in the scent of him as she sucked in a breath.

If nothing else, this only galvanised her determination to find the rest of his people.

Out of the blue he tilted his head to the side, offering a heavy-lidded smile as he clapped a hand against her upper arm. Words seemed to briefly fail him, but eventually they found purchase as he uttered something quietly but firmly, indulging in a far broader smile as he gently squeezed her arm.

It struck her as the first genuine smile she'd seen on him – not a smirk, not a grin, but a smile.

She couldn't help but return it, chewing on her bottom lip as his stare seared into her soul.

And just like that, he was done; pushing himself to his feet, he stood with the military poise that had become so familiar and, with one last glance, turned on a heel to march from the Bridge.

Only, she noted, in his languid pace, it was far less of a march and more of a shuffle of the damned.

She could barely stand to watch as he traversed the hall, never looking back as he finally rounded the corner and disappeared from view. And yet, she could not look away.

Eyes burned into the very last of what she saw of him, her words came as a feeble whisper. "David, what did he say?"

"He said 'fly safe', Doctor," David responded in hushed tones. Somehow, she found herself wondering just how much of the message survived translation.

* * *

"Alright, so the two other backpacks we left behind and your repair toolkit," Elizabeth repeated as she wrestled with the oxygen refill canister that refused to stay in her grasp.

"I imagine there is more in the backpacks for you than there is for me, but I would be immensely grateful if you retrieved my toolkit," David responded pleasantly enough, though his steely gaze refusing to leave her.

"Should be two trips, maybe three." Tossing the canister back into the bag, she turned her attention back to the fading afternoon light beyond the glass canopy. "I can't see the warship any more – how far away is he?"

"Not far away, the Juggernaut has only begun ascending."

She paused. "Juggernaut?"

"That's what those warships are designated," he offered with a gentle smile. "This, upon inspection, is a civilian supply ship, conversely."

She raised both brows. "Appropriate, I suppose. Anyway. I'll fetch the rest so we can get this show on the road."

After collecting her helmet and exiting the airlock, she found herself scarcely able to believe the disjointed, confused state she'd entered the vessel in as she reflected on the past few hours. It had all seemed so surreal, borderline intangible.

In fact, as she traversed the short stretch of barren land between the looming Engineer vessel and the ragged, forlorn and vastly smaller lifeboat, she found herself wondering if it was, in fact, all a bizarre dream. The whole ordeal just seemed so divorced from reality that it seemed only right to pick at her apparently questionable sanity.

The Engineer, she noted, had set the vessel down very close to the lifeboat indeed. Perhaps he had anticipated her rushing back to it to pick up the packs she couldn't carry in the first trip. Regardless, as she bordered jogging across the landscape, she found herself immensely thankful for his forethought.

Whether it was residual adrenaline or a sudden jump in fitness was moot, but she had powered through the first trip to and from the lifeboat with both packs hardly slowing her down. Perhaps it was a sense of urgency to simply get going, to leave this death-ridden rock behind. God knew stepping back aboard the lifeboat had been more jarring than she'd been prepared for, noting the rings of magazines still sitting in perfect mathematical order behind the piano and the scattered sheets of paper sprawled from one end of the coffee table to the other. There was still a pile of broken glass by the bar and the remains of more bottles peppered behind it; without removing her helmet, she could imagine the heady, sticky scent that must still permeate the atmosphere in there.

Much as the tinkling, pondering, rising, pounding, roaring cacophony the piano, that _bloody_ piano, had exuded these last few days.

With belongings littered about the vessel from one end of the other, acidic burns etched into the floor by the medbay, and scrawlings in a multitude of languages, she had little doubt the vessel would make for an utterly fascinating but endlessly perplexing discovery for someone, somewhere.

The second load had consisted simply of David's toolbox, but that alone was a significant weight that, in the fading pink-and-orange of approaching sunset, threatened to just about finish her off for the day. By the time she clambered aboard the supply ship once more she was left gasping for breath, and opted to leave her spoils by the entrance to the hallway to sort out at a later date before marching back to the Bridge sticky with sweat.

"Glad to see you back aboard," David enthused as she stepped onto the Bridge, releasing her helmet and propping it against the bag by the Captain's console. "We've just received a message from the Juggernaut."

Despite herself, despite every ounce of composure she could muster, her heart skipped a beat. "What does it say?"

"It says, 'Expedite your departure, CSX-7821'," he responded, matter-of-fact. After a pause, he wrinkled his nose. "Seems he's waiting in orbit."

Somehow, despite not being surprised, she found herself irritatingly disappointed. "Think he's waiting to join us or something?"

"He's probably making sure we're actually leaving," he reasoned with a quirk of a grin. "Which is, to be fair, what we should likely do next. Are you ready, Doctor?"

It was an odd question with a complicated answer, if she dared think about it. Was she ready to leave the eldritch horrors of this nightmarish world behind? Absolutely, lest she never sleep a wink again. Was she ready to leave the utter terror of the _Prometheus'_ demise here, alongside the blinding, indescribable loss that accompanied it? In a heartbeat, for there was no room in her chest for quite so much sorrow. The death, destruction and nightmare-fuel deserved to rot alone, lost in time for millennia more. But the planet itself deserved more, its magnificence parallel to the greatest Earth had to offer. The Engineers deserved more, too; it felt strange, as an Archaeologist, to leave such a mysterious site untouched, leaving answers behind and seeking questions elsewhere.

But there was nothing here worth saving.

"Yes," she eventually enthused as she clambered into the Captain's chair, "Yes, I am. Let's get out of here."

* * *

It had struck her, minutes ago, that she had never been given the opportunity to see stars racing past at faster-than-light velocities aboard the _Prometheus_ ; the entire time they were enroute to LV-223 she had been in stasis. Now, here, she found herself staring upward as she curled up in the Captain's chair, watching the silvery streaks tearing past in long, meteoric lines through the glass canopy above.

"David, did you spend much time watching the stars fly past when you were passing time on the _Prometheus_?"

"Those aren't stars," he quietly observed from his prone position in the navigation array, "It's just debris. Bits and pieces of space. The stars don't streak by quite so fast."

"Oh," she murmured after a pause. "Well, that's somewhat anticlimactic."

"Is it?" He smiled. "I thought it to be rather interesting. Empty space isn't quite so empty."

"I suppose that's fair."

Silence once again consumed the Bridge, and as the resulting exhaustion of the day finally threatened to consume her, found herself disappearing into the subtle warble of the ship's engines and the distant, hushed hiss of the environmental systems. She would need days, if not weeks, to process even a quarter of what had happened now that she was safe.

After an extended pause, David spoke again with his signature, manufactured warmth. "Elizabeth, you must be tired by now. Perhaps you'd better rest."

The mere suggestion ripped a mighty yawn from her chest. "I'm pretty stuffed, to be honest. But I don't think I'll be able to sleep for a while yet." Gazing back down at the blinking instruments before her, she shifted in her seat. "So, what's our heading, now that we're no longer pretending to head back to Earth?"

"We were headed for Orion Spur, where Earth is, but we've diverted about thirty degrees to head further up the Perseus Arm."

Arching a brow, she observed the severed android head in all his irritatingly smug glory. Even reconnecting just his power conduit had left her feeling torn and vaguely dirty – no, _tainted_. "Uh, okay. And where was Za'il headed?"

"In almost the complete opposite direction," he offered with a growing smirk. "He is traversing the Perseus Arm, headed toward its outer reaches."

This, she realised, she would need to approach carefully. If nothing else, she needed to learn how to operate this vessel _quickly_. Heaving a sigh, she changed the subject while she silently mulled her options. "Oddly, I think I'm going to miss him."

It was David's turn to raise a curious brow. "Why is that? You shared nothing in common with him, and he seemed _relieved_ to have dropped us off at our ship."

"I wouldn't say that," she countered with a vague scowl. Chewing her bottom lip in thought, she shifted against the _blasted_ chair again. "I mean, admittedly I _still_ know next to nothing about him, but...there were moments. He seemed fascinated by our culture, or at least what little of it he could find in the stack of books aboard the lifeboat. He _loved_ the piano. I get the feeling the Engineers are quite musically-inclined."

"I, too, love music," he quietly mused. "You play beautifully, Elizabeth."

"That's a given, really, isn't it?" Her scowl had hardly budged. Perhaps she was more exhausted than she cared to admit. "It felt quite special to have that with an alien. I mean, the rest of him was so _different_ to you and I – clearly he's a soldier of some kind, from a world we're yet to discover, and...I don't know, I'd have liked to have _truly_ gotten to know him."

"From what I can gather," David offered with another smirk, "He was quite a sarcastic little devil. Rather impatient. He had little time for us."

Something about that observation didn't sit right, but she had to concede it may well be true. He _had_ shown quite a slurry of emotions toward both of them, and there was an omnipresent fear within her that she'd permanently damaged their fledgeling friendship when she'd dragged David's synthetic carcass aboard. "I suppose."

The sensation that things may have been very different if she'd simply chosen a slightly different path was persistent, refusing to leave her for long.

"There will be other Engineers," the android added brightly after a lingering pause. "I believe I may have found something. At the very least, it's a candidate for their homeworld."

The chaos in her mind froze momentarily as her heart damn-near skipped a beat. "What, already?" She sat forward in her seat. "Tell me more."

His smile grew. "It's a small world, mostly mountainous and subtropical in the inhabited zones. It would only be a few months' voyage in this direction at high velocity."

Chewing at her bottom lip, she let that information steep in protracted silence. It made sense that he could have found their homeworld while attached to the navigation array, and it also made sense that they should head for it. She felt no reason to disagree. But something about it refused to sit right, refused to make total sense, as she pressed her eyes closed and pictured the mighty crescent-shaped vessel heading _away_ from that world at high velocity. Surely he was headed for exactly the same place. Shouldn't they be shadowing him, just out of sensor range?

Two thousand years was a long, _long_ time.

She really, _really_ needed to learn how to control this vessel.

"Can't hurt to take a look, I suppose," she eventually observed, unable to shake the grim tone in her voice.

"Even if it isn't the world we're searching for," the android added, "It would make for a _fascinating_ study in extraterrestrial life."

"Living things aren't really my domain," she offered with a crooked grin. "I mean, I'm still searching for the Engineers themselves – but short of discovering them, I'd prefer to find ruins. Not a nest of whatever the _Hell_ those things are on that moon."

" _All_ life is interesting, Doctor," David soothed gently, "Even that which we do not understand. In fact, the more we observe the unknown, the closer we come to _truly_ understanding creation."

Both brows shot up. " _Huh?_ "

"Life," he continued wistfully, "is something preternaturally curious for someone like me – created from parts assembled by Human hands, Human minds, left to decode the creation of the biological in those terms. I would very much like to know how it occurs elsewhere in the Galaxy, how much more _perfect_ it could be."

Something in her stomach twisted. Why was this treading on familiar, uncomfortable ground? "Sure. But first, we're visiting the Engineers. Once we've done that...sure, let's go explore _life_ at large."

"Yes, of course. The _Engineers_ first."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap.
> 
> Those Whom Fortune Favours is the tale of an alternate escape from LV-223, and with Elizabeth and David enroute the Hell away from this cesspit, this story has drawn to a close.
> 
> Rest assured, however, that this isn't the end.
> 
> There is a direct sequel in the works, and you can start reading this by checking out The Redemption. (AO3 makes it impossible to link to in chapter notes - you may need to find this story by looking at my stories under my profile, or hunting through the Prometheus tag.)
> 
> There is also an alternate version of this story in the pipeline, written from the Engineer's perspective - you'll find it named Intrepid.
> 
> The original intention of this story was to allow me to practice my writing, hone my skills and get me back in the game after years of hiatus. I originally intended to write The Redemption, albeit under another name, but used this to expand instead - needless to say it's grown a life of its own, and my writing has changed substantially as the chapters progress. As such, keep an eye out in the coming months; I'll be rewriting sections of it, improving chapters, correcting spelling and grammar horrors, adding extra detail, and if you're extra good, there might be a wee bonus once I get to the end.
> 
> Thank you all for reading, you've been a truly wonderful audience. For those of you that want to stick around, there will be both the above stories as well as a revival of several other old works of mine - just don't hold your breath for blazing speed, because I still haven't quite mastered this work-life balance stuff and find myself often working 6 day/50+ hour weeks!
> 
> Ka Kite Ano, and thank you for having me.


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